Isolation of freestanding art objects

The study of the rocking response of statues and in general the objects contained within Museums, is a research topic of great interest, being part of research and policy in the more general field of Cultural Heritage. Although the seismic protection of buildings of historical and cultural significance has been developed in all the last century, the protection of the contained objects, with reference to how they are displayed or stored has been only in the last years a key question. Significant is the case of statues and ceramics placed on pedestals. In particular cases, like the Bronzi of Riace, on purpose isolation systems have been developed, while in general museum exhibitions are not equipped with devices capable of mitigating the oscillations induced by possible earthquakes. This paper focuses the attention on this last problem, i.e. objects that can be considered as rigid bodies simply supported on the main structure, leaving out of account the filter’s effect due to the action of structure on the show-case or pedestal. This problem is the same of a large class of non-structural components, such as mechanical and electrical hospital and laboratory equipment that can lose their functionality because of earthquake motions. The influence of a further rigid body inserted between the moving base and the statue is examined in this paper. A preliminary sensitivity analysis is made on order to obtain the optimal friction coefficient to be created in these last surfaces inserted