Seismic performance evaluation of deficient steel moment-resisting frames retrofitted by vertical link elements

In many earthquake prone regions in developing countries, substandard steel moment resisting frame (SMRF) systems pose a profound danger to people and economy in the case of a strong seismic event. Eccentric bracing systems with replaceable vertical links can be utilized as an efficient and practical seismic retrofitting technique to reduce future earthquake damages to such structures. This paper aims, for the first time, to demonstrate the efficiency of eccentric bracing systems with vertical links as a seismic retrofitting technique for the SMRF structures with WCSB and to develop fragility curves for such structures. To achieve this aim, first, the effect of the vertical links on the behaviour of 3, 5 and 7-storey frames are studied through conducting the Nonlinear Static Analyses (NSA) as well as Nonlinear Time History Analyses (NTHA) using the artificial accelerograms compatible with the target design spectrum. The analysis results indicate that, as aimed in the design stage, the seismic damage is only concentrated at the replaceable vertical links and remaining structural members work mainly in the elastic range. In addition, the proposed retrofitting technique considerably improves the performance of the deficient SMRF systems by effectively restricting the displacement response and damage distribution in such structures. Following the NTHA, Incremental Dynamic Analyses (IDA) are performed to develop the seismic fragility curves for the retrofitted SMRF systems. The results indicate that the proposed retrofitting technique significantly reduces the fragility of such systems, and therefore, can provide a simple and efficient method to improve the seismic performance of deficient steel moment resisting frames in seismic regions

Modal‐based ground motion selection procedure for nonlinear response time history analysis of high‐rise buildings

The selection of representative input ground motions (IGMs) is important for a proper nonlinear response time history analysis (NLRHA) of modern structures. The prevailing IGM selection procedure requires that the response spectra of selected ground motions are matched with the code-specified design spectra, while the effect of the frequency contents combination in the time domain on the multimode interactions is not considered. Ignoring the effect of the frequency contents combination in the time domain of IGMs may cause significant variations in the analysis results for selected IGMs, although they are matched to the same design spectrum. In this paper, a modal-based ground motion selection (MGMS) procedure is proposed as a supplement to spectrum matching-based IGM selection procedures for selecting proper IGMs that can sufficiently induce the multimode interactions. In the proposed procedure, three equivalent single-degree-of-freedom (ESDOF) systems are developed by pushover analysis. NLRHA is then conducted for these ESDOF systems with a set of 20 seed IGMs chosen by the spectrum-matching–based selection procedure. Finally, seven IGMs are selected from the seed IGMs for NLRHA in the full structural model. To verify MGMS, seismic demands of high-rise buildings were computed by NLRHA with seven MGMS-selected IGMs, seven IGMs with closest spectrum matching, and groups of seven randomly selected IGMs derived from three different sets of 20 seed IGMs. The computed seismic demands with MGMS-IGMs show very good agreement with the mean demands determined using the whole set of seed IGMs, while the deviation is much lesser compared with those groups of randomly selected IGMs. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

Comparative assessment of nonlinear static and dynamic methods for analysing building response under sequential earthquake and tsunami

This paper presents a comprehensive comparison of different dynamic and static approaches for assessing building performance under sequential earthquakes and tsunami. A 10-storey reinforced concrete seismically designed Japanese vertical evacuation structure is adopted as a case study for the investigation. The case study building is first assessed under sequential earthquake and tsunami nonlinear response history analyses: the first time this is done in the literature. The resulting engineering demand parameters are then compared with those obtained when the analysis procedure is systematically simplified by substituting different static approaches for the nonlinear response history analyses in both the earthquake and tsunami loading phases. Different unloading approaches are also tested for the cases when an earthquake pushover is adopted. The results show that an earthquake nonlinear response history analysis, followed by a transient free vibration and a tsunami variable depth pushover, provides the best alternative to full dynamic analyses in terms of accuracy and computational efficiency. This structural analysis combination is recommended and has the advantage that it does not require the tsunami inundation time history to be known in advance. The proposed double pushover approach is instead deemed only suitable for the collapse assessment of regular low to mid-rise buildings and for the development of collapse fragility functions. An important observation made is that sustained earthquake damage seems not to affect the tsunami resistance of the case study building when the fully dynamic analysis is carried out for the sequential loading. This observation will be the subject of future work