Soil Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering 12 (1993) 449-450
© 1994 Elsevier Science Limited
Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved
ELSEVIER
Book Reviews
The bilinear approximation to hysteretic behavior is
developed in Chapter three as a reasonable idealization
based on a practical presentation of actual isolator
component hardware and experimental performance
results. Chapter four provides a detailed discussion of
extensions to nonisolated linear system response
analysis, needed to understand response behavior of
some important cases of base isolated system response.
Design approaches and applications of the proposed
procedures are given in Chapter five, building on the
analysis of response developed in Chapter four. Finally,
Chapter six summarizes key features of numerous
implementations of base isolation on actual buildings
and bridges throughout the world, as well as some
special industrial structures.
Chapter four is the heart of the analytical portion of
the book and is essential to the understanding of the
dynamic response of various types of structures. The
presentation here focuses on shear-type primary-systems
with linear and bilinear base isolation. Perturbation
expressions are derived for the corrections to the freefree periods and participation factors resulting from a
non-zero isolator stiffness. Viscous damping is introduced and the resulting nonclassical isolated modes are
discussed. In addition a technique is given for the
explicit calculation of the base damping and stiffness
required to obtain a desired frequency and damping
for the fundamental mode. Responses of secondarysystem and torsionally-imbalanced structures are also
discussed.
Throughout the book the authors draw on their own
work performed on steel and lead isolators at the
Department of Scientific and Industrial Research in
New Zealand. They maintain a certain balance,
acknowledging the contributions of researchers
throughout the world, and noting that they have had
no financial involvement in the patents, design,
manufacture, or marketing of any seismic isolation
system. The theoretical development focuses on building
structures, but the discussions of actual isolator
components and system implementations, and design
approaches, are also attentive to bridge structures.
Modern Approaches to Plasticity. Edited by D. Kolymbas. Elsevier, Amsterdam, 1993. ISBN 0-444-89970-7.
796 pp.
This book consists of 35 papers presented at the
Workshop on Modern Approaches to Plasticity, held
in Horton, Greece, 12-16 June 1992 under the patronage of the Council of Europe.
The constitutive modelling of granulate materials is
a rapidly growing field. The proceedings provide a
comprehensive and up to date treatise on the theory of
plasticity in granular materials, together with a great
number of solution procedures and applications. Many
of the contributions are devoted to modelling. There are
also papers investigating the phenomena to be modelled.
Researchers propose different techniques for both the
nonlinear modelling of soil behaviour and the solution
of numerical problems related to the ill-posedness of the
partial differential equations, arising due to the form of
the constitutive models.
From a soil mechanics and earthquake engineering
viewpoint, the proceedings include state-of-the-art
contributions in the areas of constitutive modelling of
soil behaviour, calibration of the models via experimentation, creep under static and cyclic loading,
liquefaction and dynamic compaction of soils.
U. Koyluoglu
An Introduction to Seismic Isolation. By R. I. Skinner,
W. H. Robinson & G. H. McVerry. John Wiley, 1993.
Base isolation has been the subject of numerous
conferences and workshops conducted by researchers
and specialists over the last five to ten years. The
importance of the subject to buildings and bridges has
been underscored by catastrophic structure collapses
during the Mexico City and Loma Prieta earthquakes.
As retrofit plans for existing structures become more
prevalent, more of the earthquake engineering community will require a general understanding of the
design and performance of the base isolation retrofit
option. This book provides a timely and excellent
presentation of the key concepts and practical aspects
of base isolation.
The book is well organized. The basic principles of
isolation are presented in Chapter two in the context of
classical normal mode and frequency domain analysis.
C. L. Mullen
Soil Mechanics for Unsaturated Soils. By D. G.
Fredlund & H. Rahardjo. John Wiley and Sons, 1993.
ISBN 0-471-85008-X. 517 pp.
449
450
Book Reviews
This textbook deals with the mechanical behaviour of
unsaturated soils which are encountered in engineering
practice in arid and semi-arid climatic conditions. More
specifically, the text addresses that class of problems
where the pore-water pressure is negative. Soils situated
above the groundwater table, unsaturated or saturated,
have negative pore water pressure; so do the compacted
soils.
The book is unique in the sense that it is the first
textbook solely concerned with the mechanical behaviour of unsaturated soils. The book is designed to be an
extension of classical saturated soil mechanics and it
starts by introducing the breadth of common geotechnical problems in unsaturated soils. The engineering
problems involved range from the expansion of swelling
clays to the loss of shear strength in a slope. It then
presents material related to the volume-mass properties,
stress state variables - - which is the most crucial
chapter for understanding the unsaturated soil behaviour, and, techniques and devices to measure the
negative pore pressure for unsaturated soils. The book
goes on to present material on the permeability, shear
strength and volume change behaviour of unsaturated
soils, with emphasis on theory, measurement and
applications. The latter part of the book concludes
with material on the transient processes of interest to
geotechnical engineering such as consolidation and
unsteady-state flow analyses. The book also covers
case histories to illustrate and substantiate the theories
related to the unsaturated soil behaviour.
U. Koyluoglu