Modeling the Seismic Protection of the Updated Cable-Stayed Bridge Benchmark with Roll-N-Cage Devices

This work presents and assesses a reduced model of a recently proposed seismic isolation system, namely the Roll-N-Cage one. This system incorporates several interesting features and mechanisms in a single unit; among the others: isolation, energy dissipation, buffering, high vertical stiffness and strength for supporting heavy loads. Departing from previous studies, which were based on the simulation of the Roll-N-Cage device by uncoupled orthogonal unidirectional models, this work first introduces a reduced order coupled bidirectional numerical model of the device. Then the efficiency of such type of control devices, as simulated by the proposed approach, is evaluated for the seismic protection of a cable supported bridge. The bridge model is derived from the ASCE benchmark cable-stayed bridge by mean of an extended version.