Toward a Vulnerability Model for Sichuan, China: RC Index Buildings Definition and Capacity Curves

Abstract eng:
Although probabilistic seismic risk assessment is now consolidated enough to escape academic boundaries and become widely used in several practical applications, China has fallen behind the state-of-art in developing tools for its practical implementation, particularly from the perspective of seismic vulnerability assessment. Research in other countries, for instance in the US and in Southern European countries, can be adopted as a reference to advance models and tools for assessing seismic vulnerability in China. Specifically, using the Global Earthquake Model (GEM) Analytical Vulnerability framework, this study describes the first steps in deriving a robust procedure for obtaining fragility and vulnerability functions for structures in China. The first part of this paper looks at developing an inventory of typical building types in the Sichuan Province by deriving data from the latest 2010 Chinese Census. This allows the definition of a set of 21 index buildings to be used in the fragility assessment of low-rise and mid-rise reinforced concrete (RC) structures. The index buildings of 2-storey, 5-storey and 8-storey are designed following the detailing characteristics representative of the Sichuan construction practice. Different versions of Chinese seismic design codes e.g., GBJ11-1989, GB50011-2001, GB500112010 are considered in the definition of the archetype buildings. Nonlinear static analysis is performed on detailed 3D models of the buildings to generate capacity curves. These curves constitute the first step in the ongoing development of a generic framework for constructing a state-of-the-art vulnerability model for China, properly accounting for structural and ground motion uncertainties.

• Export as: BibTeX | MARC | MARCXML | DC | EndNote | NLM | RefWorks
• Add to your basket