Site-specific seismic design of damage tolerant structural systems using a novel concept

Designing more seismic load-tolerant structures is one of the major challenges of the world communities. It is due to the inability of the profession to predict future design earthquake time histories at a site compounded by the failure to appropriately incorporate uncertainties in other design variables and structural behavior just before failure. A site-specific method is proposed to generate a suite of ground excitation time histories and a novel risk estimation is developed considering major sources of nonlinearity and uncertainty. For wider application and acceptance, the risk evaluation procedure essentially consists of few deterministic time domain finite element analyses. The procedure is verified and showcased by estimating risks associated with three buildings designed by professional experts in the Los Angeles area satisfying the post-Northridge design criteria for the overall lateral deflection and inter-story drift. The accuracy of the estimated risk is verified using the Monte Carlo simulation technique. In all cases, the probabilities of collapse are found to satisfy the current code requirements. The spread in the reliability indexes for each building for both limit states cannot be overlooked, indicating the significance of the frequency contents of the time histories. The inter-story drift is found to be more critical than the overall lateral displacement. The reliability indexes for both limit states are similar only for few cases. The authors believe that they proposed an alternative to the classical random vibration and simulation approaches. The proposed site-specific seismic safety assessment procedure can be used by practicing engineers for routine applications.