Comparative evaluation of probabilistic uncertainty-propagations to seismic collapse capacity of low-rise steel moment-resisting frames

Abstract

The collapse capacity of a structure employing hysteretic energy dissipating devices (HEDDs) is considerably influenced by the uncertainties which are categorized to the aleatory and epistemic uncertainties. This study aims to comparatively evaluate uncertainty-propagations to the seismic collapse performance of the low-rise steel moment-resisting frames (SMRFs) with and without HEDDs, and to investigate on the effects of HEDDs to the failure modes of damped structures when the uncertainties are collectively propagated to the seismic response. In order to achieve this, incremental dynamic analyses are carried out to assess the collapse capacities of typical low-rise SMRFs with and without HEDDs. The Monte-Carlo simulation adopting a Latin hypercube sampling method is then performed to reflect the probabilistic uncertainty-propagation to the collapse capacities of structures. The analysis results show that the collapse capacities of low-rise SMRFs are considerably changed due to the uncertainty-propagation and HEDDs decrease the uncertainty-propagation to the collapse capacities of low-rise SMRFs because they induces a constant collapse mode with relatively low variation.