Effectiveness study of wire mesh vibration damper for sensitive equipment protection from seismic events

•Wire mesh vibration damper (WMVD) is presented as seismic mitigation solution to protect sensitive equipment from earthquake induced floor motion.•Multi-body model of the WMVD isolated system is developed using Matlab Simscape MultibodyTM.•An artificial seismic time-history generation procedure is employed to simulate the synthetic earthquakes.•The effectiveness of the studied isolator is demonstrated based on the comparisons of dynamic seismic responses between WMVD and linearly isolated systems.•Reliability of the WMVD to protect vibration-sensitive equipment is investigated based on seismic fragility analysis.