• Wind and Structures
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• v.31 no.5
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• pp.381-392
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• 2020

Despite that the failure of sign structure may not have disastrous consequence, its sheer number still ensures the need for rigorous safety standard to regulate their maintenance and construction. During its service life, a sign structure is subject to extensive wind load, sometimes well over its permissible design load. A fragility analysis of a sign structure offers a tool for rational decision making and safety evaluation by using a probabilistic framework to consider the various sources of uncertainty that affect its performance. Wind fragility analysis was used to determine the performance of sign structure based on the performance of its connection components. In this study, basic wind fragility concepts and data required to support the fragility analysis of the sign structure such as sign panel's parameters, connection component's parameters, as well as wind load parameters were presented. Fragility and compound fragility analysis showed disparity between connection component. Additionally, reinforcement of the connection system was introduced as an example of the utilization of wind fragility results in the retrofit decision making.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.25 no.6
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• pp.267-274
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• 2021

Seismic fragility analysis of a structure is generally performed for the expected critical component of a structure. The seismic fragility analysis assumes that all the components behave independently in a structural system. A bridge system consists of many inter-connected components. Thus, for an accurate evaluation of the seismic fragility of a bridge, the seismic fragility analysis requires the composition of probabilities considering the correlation between structural components. This study presented a procedure to obtain the seismic fragility curve of a bridge system, considering the correlation between bridge components. Seismic fragility analysis was performed on a PSC bridge that is considered as the central infrastructure. The analysis results showed that the probability of the seismic fragility curve of the bridge system was higher than that of each bridge component.

• Proceedings of the Korea Concrete Institute Conference
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• 2006.05a
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• pp.310-313
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• 2006

The purpose of this study is to develop Performance Based Design Method based on application of Fragility Method. Fragility Method has been used in predicting failure of structure due to seismic action, However, development of Fragility Curve based on material or construction for PBD is developed, This paper suggests that Fragility Method can be modified for PBD and can assess the performance of concrete material or construction.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.3 no.4
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• pp.155-162
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• 1999

This paper presents a generation of analytical fragility curves for bridge. The analytical fragility curves are constructed on the basis of nonlinear dynamic analysis. Two-parameter lognormal distribution functions are used to represent the fragility curves with the parameters estimated by the maximum likelihood method. To demonstrate the development of analytical fragility curves, two of representative bridges with a precast prestressed continuous deck in the Memphis. Tennessee area are used.

• Proceedings of the Korea Concrete Institute Conference
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• 2006.05a
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• pp.334-337
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• 2006

Generally, fragility curve has been used in predicting failure of structures due to seismic actions. In this research, the method of drawing fragility curve has been applied to evaluating success/failure of structures and satisfactory/unsatisfactory of concrete mixture performance based on material parameters. In the paper, a detailed explanation of the procedure of drawing fragility curve based on material parameter has been introduced. Fragility curve generating procedure includes generation of virtual data points from limited number of actual data points by bell curve implementation, determination of success/failure status of each data point by assigned criterion, and completion of final fragility curve. For practical applications, workability of concrete mixture content based on "unit water" has been used to obtain fragility curve. Detailed explanation of fragility curve drawing procedure for material parameters is presented.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.179-186
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• 2020

Investigating damage potential of the railway infrastructure requires either large amount of case histories or in-depth numerical analyses, or both for which large amounts of effort and time are necessary to accomplish thoroughly. Rather than performing comprehensive studies for each damage case, in this study we collect and analyze a case history of the high-speed railway system damaged by the 2004 M6.6 Niigata Chuetsu earthquake for the development of the seismic fragility curve. The development processes are: 1) slice the railway system as 200 m segments and assigned damage levels and intensity measures (IMs) to each segment; 2) calculate probability of damage for a given IM; 3) estimate fragility curves using the maximum likelihood estimation regression method. Among IMs considered for fragility curves, spectral acceleration at 3 second period has the most prediction power for the probability of damage occurrence. Also, viaduct-type structure provides less scattered probability data points resulting in the best-fitted fragility curve, but for the tunnel-type structure data are poorly scattered for which fragility curve fitted is not meaningful. For validation purpose fragility curves developed are applied to the 2016 M7.0 Kumamoto earthquake case history by which another high-speed railway system was damaged. The number of actual damaged segments by the 2016 event is 25, and the number of equivalent damaged segments predicted using fragility curve is 22.21. Both numbers are very similar indicating that the developed fragility curve fits well to the Kumamoto region. Comparing with railway fragility curves from HAZUS, we found that HAZUS fragility curves are more conservative.

• International journal of steel structures
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• v.18 no.5
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• pp.1607-1616
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• 2018

Quantitatively modeling and propagating all sources of uncertainty stand at the core of seismic fragility assessment of structures. This paper investigates the effects of various sources of uncertainty on seismic responses and seismic fragility estimates of single-layer reticulated domes. Sensitivity analyses are performed to examine the sensitivity of typical seismic responses to uncertainties in structural modeling parameters, and the results suggest that the variability in structural damping, yielding strength, steel ultimate strain, dead load and snow load has significant effects on the seismic responses, and these five parameters should be taken as random variables in the seismic fragility assessment. Based on this, fragility estimates and fragility curves incorporating different levels of uncertainty are obtained on the basis of the results of incremental dynamic analyses on the corresponding set of 40 sample models generated by Latin Hypercube Sampling method. The comparisons of these fragility curves illustrate that, the inclusion of only ground motion uncertainty is inappropriate and inadequate, and the appropriate way is incorporating the variability in the five identified structural modeling parameters as well into the seismic fragility assessment of single-layer reticulated domes.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.14 no.5
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• pp.847-867
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• 2014

There are continuous efforts to mitigate structural losses from earthquakes and manage risk through seismic risk assessment; seismic fragility curves are widely accepted as an essential tool of such efforts. Seismic fragility curves can be classified into four groups based on how they are derived: empirical, judgmental, analytical, and hybrid. Analytical fragility curves are the most widely used and can be further categorized into two subgroups, depending on whether an analytical function or simulation method is used. Although both methods have shown decent performances for many seismic fragility problems, they often oversimplify the given problems in reliability or structural analyses owing to their built-in assumptions. In this paper, a new method is proposed for the development of seismic fragility curves. Integration with sophisticated software packages for reliability analysis (FERUM) and structural analysis (ZEUS-NL) allows the new method to obtain more accurate seismic fragility curves for less computational cost. Because the proposed method performs reliability analysis using the first-order reliability method, it provides component probabilities as well as useful byproducts and allows further fragility analysis at the system level. The new method was applied to a numerical example of a 2D frame structure, and the results were compared with those by Monte Carlo simulation. The method was found to generate seismic fragility curves more accurately and efficiently. Also, the effect of system reliability analysis on the development of seismic fragility curves was investigated using the given numerical example and its necessity was discussed.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.253-261
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• 2018

This article details a bridge-specific fragility method developed to enhance the seismic design and resilience of bridges. Current seismic design processes provide guidance for the design of a bridge that will not collapse during a design hazard event. However, they do not provide performance information of the bridge at different hazard levels or due to design changes. Therefore, there is a need for a supplement to this design process that will provide statistical information on the performance of a bridge, beyond traditional emphases on collapse prevention. This article proposes a bridge-specific parameterized fragility method to enable efficient estimation of various levels of damage probability for alternative bridge design parameters. A multi-parameter demand model is developed to incorporate bridge design details directly in the fragility estimation. Monte Carlo simulation and Logistic regression are used to determine the fragility of the bridge or bridge component. The resulting parameterized fragility model offers a basis for a bridge-specific design tool to explore the influence of design parameter variation on the expected performance of a bridge. When used as part of the design process, these tools can help to transform a prescriptive approach into a more performance-based approach, efficiently providing probabilistic performance information about a new bridge design. An example of the method and resulting fragility estimation is presented.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.22 no.5
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• pp.271-280
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• 2018

This paper presents a framework for developing aftershock fragility curves for reinforced concrete bridges initially damaged by mainshocks. The presented aftershock fragility is a damage-dependent fragility function, which is conditioned on an initial damage state resulting from mainshocks. The presented framework can capture the cumulative damage of as-built bridges due to mainshock-aftershock sequences as well as the reduced vulnerability of bridges repaired with CFRP pier jackets. To achieve this goal, the numerical model of column jackets is firstly presented and then validated using existing experimental data available in literature. A four-span concrete box-girder bridge is selected as a case study to examine the application of the presented framework. The aftershock fragility curves are derived using response data from back-to-back nonlinear dynamic analyses under mainshock-aftershock sequences. The aftershock fragility curves for as-built bridge columns are firstly compared with different levels of initial damage state, and then the post-repair effect of FRP pier jacket is examined through the comparison of aftershock fragility curves for as-built and repaired piers.