A New Insight to the Earthquake Input Energy and Its Variation With Building’s Dynamical Characteristics

Abstract eng:
Damages created in several relatively new buildings in recent earthquakes have shown that some of seismic design codes, which are strength-based, do not necessarily result in reliable design. On the other hand, since mid 70s many researchers have claimed that input energy can be a good parameter to be considered in seismic design of building systems. However, up to now no straightforward method has been introduced for this purpose. Obviously, if the input energy can be reduced, it will help the building safety. This paper investigates the variation of input energy with variation of building’s characteristics considering both elastic and inelastic behaviors, and seeks how this variation can be used for more reliable seismic design of buildings. To realize that how the building’s characteristics, including natural period and damping as well as strength and ductility values can affect the input energy some sample 1-story frames with various parameters have been considered and the input energy have been calculated for them by using some accelerograms having various frequency content from low to high. In each case just one parameter of the building characteristic has been considered variable, to find out the effect of each characteristic independently. Numerical results show that in general the input energy in a building for each earthquake varies with the variation of building characteristics. Among the aforementioned characteristic the damping seems to be more tangible to work with, so that for each earthquake a specific damping value can be found to lead to a minimum input energy.

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