Improved estimation on seismic behavior of RC column members: A probabilistic method considering dynamic effect and structural parameter uncertainties

Abstract

To acquire more accurate and reliable seismic behavior of reinforced concrete (RC) column members, a probabilistic estimation method for considering both the impacts of loading rate-sensitivity of materials and randomness in structural parameters is proposed in this paper. The previously developed dynamic modified coefficient (DMC) models are extended to include different sources of uncertainties by using the Monte-Carlo (MC) simulation with the Latin hypercube sampling (LHS) technique. The influences of variations in key structural parameters on the DMC estimates are investigated through sensitivity analysis. Moreover, the accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed method are verified by qualitatively and quantitatively comparing the probabilistic predictions with the available dynamic loading test results. Furthermore, the computation procedure of the dynamic skeleton model cluster (DSMC) is put forward and typical cases of skeleton line are also discussed. The impacts of randomness in structural parameters and skeleton line number on the DSMC predicted results are presented. This research shows that more reasonable estimate on the seismic behavior of RC column members can be obtained by employing the proposed probabilistic method, which can be further applied into the seismic reliability assessment of RC frame structures in future research works.