The effect of different earthquake ground motion levels on the performance of steel structures in settlements with different seismic hazards

The updated Turkish Building Earthquake Code has been significantly renovated and expanded compared to previous seismic design codes. The use of earthquake ground motion levels with different probabilities of exceedance is one of the major advances in structural mechanics with the current code. This study aims to investigate the earthquake performance of steel structure in settlements with different seismic hazards for various earthquake ground motion levels. It is focused on earthquake and structural parameters for four different ground motion levels with different probabilities of exceedance calculated according to the location of the structure by the updated Turkish Hazard Map. For this purpose, each of the seven different geographical regions of Turkey which has the same seismic zone in the previous earthquake hazard map has been considered. Earthquake parameters, horizontal design elastic spectra obtained and comparisons were made for all different ground motion levels for the seven different locations, respectively. Structural analyzes for a sample steel structure were carried out using pushover analysis by using the obtained design spectra. It has been determined that the different ground motion levels significantly affect the expected target displacements of the structure for performance criteria. It is noted that the different locations of the same earthquake zone in the previous code with the same earthquake-building parameters show significant variations due to the micro zoning properties of the updated seismic design code. In addition, the main innovations of the updated code were discussed.