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by bobthepanda 1608 days ago
Reading the headline, I thought they were going to talk about base isolating the entire building.

It's quite intriguing, and I suppose I've just never thought of it that way, that you can base isolate individual objects.

1 comments

At one of the datacenters I used to work in regularly the SAN engineers were always up for demonstrating the base isolation of their Hitachi storage array - The whole thing sat on a plate atop a ball-bearing pit, and could be shoved about a foot in any direction. Which they would invite you to do. Given the weight of the unit you'd never get it to budge more than a cm but they had videos of it during earthquakes showing it moving around the full range of motion.

It was very 'v1' as far as base isolation goes and their newer equipment has more sophisticated protection, but it's an interesting field. On a larger scale the use of damping weight to protect entire buildings is amazing to see: https://youtu.be/NYSgd1XSZXc