Abstract
To strengthen the resilience of our built environment, a good understanding of seismic risk is required. Probabilistic performance-based assessment is able to rigorously compute seismic risk and the advent of numerical computer-based analyses has helped with this. However, it is still a challenging process and as such, this study presents a simplified probabilistic displacement-based assessment approach for reinforced concrete wall buildings. The proposed approach is trialed by applying the methodology to 4-, 8-, and 12-story case study buildings, and results are compared with those obtained via multi-stripe analyses, with allowance for uncertainty in demand and capacity, including some allowance for modeling uncertainty. The results indicate that the proposed approach enables practitioners to practically estimate the median intensity associated with exceeding a given mechanism and the annual probability of exceeding assessment limit states. Further research to extend the simplified approach to other structural systems is recommended. Moreover, the research highlights the need for more information on the uncertainty in our strength and deformation estimates, to improve the accuracy of risk assessment procedures.
Highlights
Guidelines for the effective quantification and mitigation of seismic risk are essential for the resilience of our built environment and communities in general
These case study buildings have the same period (2s) and, looking at the median intensity capacity results, one would anticipate that the seismic risk for the 8-story building is higher than that of the 12-story building
The probabilistic displacement-based assessment approach put forward for single degree of freedom systems by Orumiyehei and Sullivan [12] has been extended to reinforced concrete wall buildings in this work
Summary
Guidelines for the effective quantification and mitigation of seismic risk are essential for the resilience of our built environment and communities in general. A number of valuable guidelines already exist for the seismic assessment of buildings, including the Eurocode 8 part 3 [1] in Europe, FEMA 273/274 [2] in the US, and the MBIE NZSEE Seismic Assessment guidelines [3] in New Zealand. A number of proposals have been made in the literature to permit seismic risk assessment in a simplified manner, including the works of [4,5,6,7,8,9,10] Such simplified methods are desirable since they are more likely to be widely implemented in practice. As an alternative to software-driven pushover analyses, Priestley et al [11] advocates a displacement-based assessment procedure that has been implemented within the New Zealand national seismic assessment guidelines [3]. The performance of the proposed methodology will be gauged by comparing the assessed likelihood of exceeding key limit states with values obtained from rigorous probabilistic assessment methods
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