Building performance for earthquake resilience

Abstract

Building seismic performance plays an important role in earthquake resilience. This role can be characterized beyond safety and collapse prevention, which are the primary building code objectives, by evaluating the loss of function and costs of repair of buildings. One important measure for building performance evaluation is the damage that occurs when structural and nonstructural elements are deformed beyond their capacity during an earthquake. Through a risk-based performance evaluation procedure, the expected impact of changes in stiffness, strength, and deformation capacity on building damage can be quantified and the results can be utilized to make targeted improvements to building codes to enhance earthquake resilience. In this paper, models of 4, 7, 10, and 15-story reinforced concrete special moment frame structures designed for San Francisco are subjected to suites of earthquake ground motion records to evaluate deformation response for a range of earthquake intensities. From these analyses the statistics of demand are estimated and used, along with models of capacity and seismic hazard, to evaluate the expected repair costs and loss of function over the life of each building. Performing this analysis for a range of values for each design variable will demonstrate the influence of stiffness, strength, and deformation capacity on building seismic performance, which can be used for evaluating and enhancing community resilience.