AN AMBITIOUS TASK

INSPIRE will incorporate recent scientific and technological breakthroughs, mainly developed within the broad concept of meta-materials, to propose and implement holistic and novel soil-foundation-structure concepts for the efficient protection of structures from ground induced hazards. Research will be channeled to:

  • Interventions to the foundation soil (and not to the structure itself) intended to divert seismic waves or substantially attenuate the earthquake motion before exciting the structure.

  • Broad-band isolation concepts incorporating negative stiffness inclusions and engineered microstructures of hyper-damping behavior aiming at high impact – infrastructure components.

  • Urban scale soil-foundation-structure schemes integrating combinations of meta-concepts to provide seismic protection at a community level.

WHY WORKING WITH ‘META-MATERIALS’ ?

The notion of “meta-materials” refers to natural or articial materials or structures generated by periodically repeated unit blocks which exhibit extraordinary properties for inhibiting or conditioning wave propagation in all spatial directions over broad frequency bands. Moreover, by simply changing either the dimensions of the unit block, the shape of the core unit or its repetition pattern, it is possible to manufacture materials of specified stiffness/absorption properties envisioned for low-cost seismic/noise isolation applications.

HIGHLIGHTS

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INSPIRE Partners

INSPIRE participants include eight (8) interdisciplinary academic partners with distinguished background in geotechnical, structural, civil, mechanical, acoustical engineering. This group is supported by eleven (11) companies/market leaders in the entire field of seismic and low-frequency noise and vibration protection and one (1) leading European Research Institute in the domain.

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