Fragility Curves for Seismic Vulnerability Assessment of Reinforced Concrete Frame Buildings in Canada

Abstract eng:
Performance of reinforced concrete frame buildings in recent earthquakes indicates variations in damage levels depending on the seismic hazard of the region and the vulnerability of structures. While older buildings that lack proper seismic design and detailing practices suffer the most damage, newer buildings perform better, but are still expected to suffer different degrees of damage depending on the level of ground excitation and the stringency of design employed. Performance-based evaluation of buildings requires fragility curves for different levels of performance. Commonly accepted performance limits include; immediate occupancy, life safety and collapse prevention. The objective of this paper is to present seismic fragility curves generated for different limit states, where the intensity of hazard is expressed in terms of spectral accelerations, and the building performance is expressed in terms of maximum inter-storey drift. Two reinforced concrete frame buildings with 5-stories were considered for the development of fragility curves, for a building period typically encountered in practice. The buildings were designed to represent post-1985 era construction in Canada. They represented a moderately ductile building in Ottawa subjected to eastern Canadian seismicity and a fully ductile building in Vancouver subjected to western Canadian seismicity. The buildings were analyzed using PERFORM-3D software to assess their seismic vulnerabilities. Incremental Dynamic Analysis (IDA) was employed with different scale factors to generate the fragility curves. Two sets of earthquake records compatible with uniform hazard spectra (UHS) of 2010 NBCC were selected, where each set contained 20 records for each city. The fragility curves depict probabilities of exceedances for different damage states, and can be used for seismic vulnerability assessment of 5-storey reinforced concrete frame buildings in Canada, representing mid-rise construction designed and built after 1985.

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