Base isolation, also known as seismic or base isolation system, is a collection of structural elements which should substantially decouple

a superstructure from its substructure resting on a shaking ground thus protecting a building or nonbuilding structure's integrity. Base isolation is the most powerful tool of the earthquake engineering pertainin g to the passive structural vibration control technologies. It is meant to enabl e a building or non-building structure to survive a potentially devastating seis mic impact through a proper initial design or subsequent modifications. In some cases, application of base isolation can raise both a structure's seismic perfor mance and its seismic sustainability considerably. Animation movie 1 : Concept of Base Isolation (Concurrent shake table testing of two building models. The right one is equippe d with a seismic base isolation) Base isolation system consists of isolation units with or without isolation comp onents, where: 1. Isolation units are the basic elements of base isolation system which are int ended to provide the mentioned decoupling effect to a building or non-building s tructure. 2. Isolation components are the connections between isolation units and their pa rts having no decoupling effect of their own. By their response to an earthquake impact, all isolation units may be divided in to two basic categories: shear units and sliding units .