Abstract
Although pre-Northridge earthquake steel moment resisting frame buildings have been shown to be susceptible to brittle connection failures, they still represent a large fraction of the existing steel buildings in the United States of America. In this study, the performance of the 3- and 9-story Los Angeles pre-Northridge SAC buildings are analyzed considering ductile and brittle beam-column connection failures, and their uncertainty. This paper contributes to understanding the influence of uncertainty associated with connections brittle fracture on building interstory deformation capacity and its impact on bias and variability of fragility functions and loss assessment. The results show that considering brittle connections leads to significantly larger drift demands and to higher repair costs, particularly under intense ground shaking. New fragility curve parameters are derived that account for the effect of the uncertainty of the strength and deformation capacity of brittle connections.
Highlights
Prior to the 1994 Northridge earthquake, welded steel construction was widely accepted in seismic regions and was especially common in the United States (US) West Coast
For the LA3 building model, a significant increase in the peak interstory drift ratio (IDR) is observed for both intensity levels (80% and 146% for Design Basis Earthquake (DBE) and Maximum Considered Earthquake (MCE), respectively)
For the LA9 building model, a negligible increase in peak IDR is obtained for the brittle structural model relative to ductile structural model for the DBE intensity level and a relatively small increase (17%) is recorded for the MCE level
Summary
Prior to the 1994 Northridge earthquake, welded steel construction was widely accepted in seismic regions and was especially common in the United States (US) West Coast. Several authors [Luco and Cornell (2000); Shi and Foutch (1997); Prakash, Powell and Campbell (1993)] stated that, considering failure of connections consistently increases displacements, the magnitude of the increase varies among different building typologies. In these studies, connections were simulated using the bilinear model shown, in which the plastic rotation θf is the main parameter related to fracture. The fracture rotation depends on the quality of the welding, which varies significantly across and within buildings
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