Seismic Fragility Analysis of Tunnels with Different Buried Depths in a Soft Soil

Seismic fragility of an engineering structure is the conditional probability that damage of a structure equals or exceeds a limit state under a specified intensity motion. It represents the seismic performance of structures and the correlation between ground motion and structural damage, playing an indispensable role in structural security assessment. A practical evaluation procedure of acquiring the fragility curves of tunnels in a soft soil has been proposed in this paper. Taking a typical metro tunnel in Shanghai as an example, two-dimensional finite element models of soil-tunnel cross-section were established. The nonlinear characteristics of soil layers were considered by the one-dimensional equivalent linear analysis in the equivalent-linear earthquake site response analyses (EERA) program. The ground motions were selected based on seismic station records. Comparing the analytical fragility curves with the empirical curves derived from American Lifelines Alliance (ALA) and HAZUS shows that the proposed method is reliable and feasible. Further study about the influence of buried depths on the fragility of the tunnel was performed. The results indicate that the failure probability of the tunnel is not monotonically decreasing with the increase of the buried depth for a given peak ground acceleration (PGA.)