Experimental studies on fiber mesh reinforced elastomeric bearings


Tezin Türü: Doktora

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, Mühendislik Fakültesi, İnşaat Mühendisliği Bölümü, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2013

Öğrenci: ALİ KARIMZADEH NAGHSHINEH

Danışman: UĞURHAN AKYÜZ

Özet:

New types of fiber reinforced rubber based bearings have been a research interest for a number of engineers in the past decade. These new type of bearings can have similar performance compared to the conventional ones. In most of the previous researches, the fiber reinforced rubber based bearings are usually manufactured with placing fiber sheets between pre-cut rubber layers with use of a bonding agent. This research differs from the previous researches in terms of manufacturing process and use of fiber mesh instead of fiber sheets. The aim of this research is to compare the fundamental response characteristics of fiber mesh reinforced elastomeric bearings and conventional steel reinforced bearings. In this scope, ten pairs of fiber mesh reinforced elastomeric bearings and ten pairs of steel reinforced elastomeric bearings were subjected to various levels of compression and cyclic shear strains under constant vertical pressure. The tested types of bearings are fiber mesh reinforced elastomeric bearings and steel reinforced elastomeric bearings. There is not any analytical study which considers the effect of fiber flexural flexibility on horizontal stiffness of bearings. In this study, the results of horizontal shear tests were used to study the effect of fiber flexibility on horizontal stiffness of bearings. Furthermore results of compression test were used to evaluate the effect of fiber flexibility on vertical stiffness of bearings. Stress distributions in the bearings were studied by modeling two of the bearings in commercial finite element software called ABAQUS. Results of pressure solution were used to study the performance of bearings in vertical direction and compare them with the results of finite element study and experimental tests. To evaluate the performance of bearings in low temperature, some of the specimens were also subjected to low temperature shear test. The major advantage for fiber mesh reinforced bearings observed during the tests was that these bearings developed a considerable low horizontal stiffness compared to the conventional steel reinforced bearings. It is also observed that damping characteristics of the new and conventional types were similar to each other.