The response of freestanding busts and statues exposed to the threats of moderate-to-high ground motions may cause significant damage through different mechanisms, namely sliding, rocking, and overturning. Seismic protection of museum artifacts has typically been based on best-practice approaches rarely supported by engineering evidence. Practice-oriented methods used to limit rocking may induce excessive stress concentrations at the base of statues and busts, which in turn may generate fracture or localized cracks. The present study investigates experimentally the efficiency of double concave curved surface slider isolators (DCCSSs) for protecting artistic assets. The study illustrates the results of comprehensive tests on real-scale busts and statues. Such tests were carried out at CEA laboratory, Saclay (France), utilizing the state-of-art six-degrees-of-freedom shake table Azalee. Earthquake records with different frequency contents, recorded from recent European earthquakes, along with building floor accelerations were used as input strong motions. Isolated and non-isolated artifacts were assessed experimentally with incremental loadings. The test results demonstrate that DCCSSs effectively reduce seismic acceleration amplifications. Such devices can be utilized to prevent rocking and overturning, thus enhancing the seismic resilience of vulnerable artworks and, in turn, mitigating potential losses.
Berto et al. (Thu,) studied this question.