Abstract
Design of economic structures adequately resistant to withstand during their service life, without catastrophic failures, all possible loading conditions and to absorb the induced seismic energy in a controlled fashion, has been the subject of intensive research so far. Modern buildings usually contain extremely sensitive and costly equipment that are vital in business, commerce, education and/or health care. The building contents frequently are more valuable than the buildings them-selves. Furthermore, hospitals, communication and emergency centres, police and fire stations must be operational when needed most: immediately after an earthquake. Conventional con-struction can cause very high floor accelerations in stiff buildings and large interstorey drifts in flexible structures. These two factors cause difficulties in insuring the safety of both building and its contents. For this reason base-isolated structures are considered as an efficient alternative design practice to the conventional fixed-base one. In this study a systematic assessment of op-timized fixed and base-isolated reinforced concrete buildings is presented in terms of their initial and total cost taking into account the life-cycle cost of the structures.
Highlights
According to the contemporary seismic design approaches, structures need to comply with multiple performance-based criteria described for various hazard levels ranging from earthquakes with low intensity and small return period to more destructive events with large return periods
Design Optimization of Base-Isolated Buildings where CIN represents the initial cost of a new or retrofitted structural system, CLC denotes the life-cycle cost in present value; s is the vector of design parameters, while t is the time period
It accounts for the damage-repair cost (Cdam), the loss of contents cost due to structural damages that are quantified by the maximum inter-storey drift (Ccθon) and due to floor acceleration (Cacoccn), the cost of injury recovery (Cinj) or human fatality (Cfat) and other direct or indirect economic losses after an earthquake, related to rental (Cren), and loss of income (Cinc), as shown in CLC = Cdam + Ccθon + Cacoccn + Cren + Cinc + Cinj + Cfat (11)
Summary
According to the contemporary seismic design approaches, structures need to comply with multiple performance-based criteria described for various hazard levels ranging from earthquakes with low intensity and small return period to more destructive events with large return periods. Constantinou and Tadjbakhsh (1984) considered a linear multistorey structure with a seismic base-isolated system consisting of rubber bearings and frictional elements where the isolation system was optimally designed. Zou (2008) and Zou et al (2010) presented an optimization technique for the seismic design of base-isolated concrete buildings aiming to minimize the total cost subject to design performance and reliability criteria. An integrated and objective assessment of the performance of multistorey 3D reinforced concrete (RC) buildings is presented, considering fully fixed and base-isolated support conditions. For this purpose, performance-based optimized designs are obtained with respect to minimum initial cost for both types of buildings.
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