• International Journal of High-Rise Buildings
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• v.4 no.3
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• pp.171-180
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• 2015

A shaking table test was conducted at the E-Defense shaking table facility to investigate the damage and collapse behavior of a steel high-rise building under exceedingly large ground motions. The specimen is a one-third scale 18-story steel moment frame designed and constructed according to design specifications and practices used in the 1980s and 1990s. The shaking table tests used a long-duration, long-period ground motion simulated for a sequential Tokai, Nankai, and Nankai earthquake scenario. The building specimen was subjected to a series of progressively increasing scaled motions until it completely collapsed. The damage to the steel frame began through the yielding of beams along lower stories and column bases of the first story. After several excitations by increasing scaled motions, cracks initiated at the welded moment connections and fractures in the beam flanges spread to the lower stories. As the shear strength of each story decreased, the drifts of lower stories increased and the frame finally collapsed and settled on the supporting frame. From the test, a typical progression of collapse for a tall steel moment frame was obtained, and the hysteretic behavior of steel structural members including deterioration due to local buckling and fracture were observed. The results provide important information for further understanding and an accurate numerical simulation of collapse behavior.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.43-52
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• 2004

This paper describes a method of evaluating seismic system performance of highway transportation network in California. The basic element that plays a crucial role in this study is the fragility information of highway bridges in Caltrans' (California Department of Transportation) freeway network. The bridge fragility information is expressed as a function of the ground motion intensity, such as peak ground acceleration (PGA) or peak ground velocity (PGV). Network damage was evaluated under the 1994 Northridge earthquake and scenario earthquakes. A probabilistic model was developed to determine the effect of repair of bridge damage on the improvement of the network performance as days passed after the event. As an example, the system performance degradation measured in terms of an index, “Drivers Delay”, is calculated for the Los Angeles area transportation system, and losses due to Drivers Delay with and without retrofit were estimated.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.36 no.3
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• pp.321-341
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• 2010

The seismic-induced failure of a dam could have catastrophic consequences associated with the sudden release of the impounded reservoir. Depending on the severity of the seismic hazard, the characteristics and size of the dam-reservoir system, preventing such a failure scenario could be a problem of critical importance. In many cases, the release of water is controlled through a reinforced-concrete intake tower. This paper describes the application of a static nonlinear procedure known as the Capacity Spectrum Method (CSM) to evaluate the structural integrity of intake towers subject to seismic ground motion. Three variants of the CSM are considered: a multimodal pushover scheme, which uses the idea proposed by Chopra and Goel (2002); an adaptive pushover variant, in which the change in the stiffness of the structure is considered; and a combination of both approaches. The effects caused by the water surrounding the intake tower, as well as any water contained inside the hollow structure, are accounted for by added hydrodynamic masses. A typical structure is used as a case study, and the accuracy of the CSM analyses is assessed with time history analyses performed using commercial and structural analysis programs developed in Matlab.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.195-215
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• 2016

Rehabilitation of historical unreinforced masonry (URM) buildings is a priority in many parts of the world, since those buildings are a living part of history and a testament of human achievement of the era of their construction. Many of these buildings are still operational; comprising brittle materials with no reinforcements, with spatially distributed mass and stiffness, they are not encompassed by current seismic assessment procedures that have been developed for other structural types. To facilitate the difficult task of selecting a proper rehabilitation strategy - often restricted by international treaties for non-invasiveness and reversibility of the intervention - and given the practical requirements for the buildings' intended reuse, this paper presents a practical procedure for assessment of seismic demands of URM buildings - mainly historical constructions that lack a well-defined diaphragm action. A key ingredient of the method is approximation of the spatial shape of lateral translation, ${\Phi}$, that the building assumes when subjected to a uniform field of lateral acceleration. Using ${\Phi}$ as a 3-D shape function, the dynamic response of the system is evaluated, using the concepts of SDOF approximation of continuous systems. This enables determination of the envelope of the developed deformations and the tendency for deformation and damage localization throughout the examined building for a given design earthquake scenario. Deformation demands are specified in terms of relative drift ratios referring to the in-plane and the out-of-plane seismic response of the building's structural elements. Drift ratio demands are compared with drift capacities associated with predefined performance limits. The accuracy of the introduced procedure is evaluated through (a) comparison of the response profiles with those obtained from detailed time-history dynamic analysis using a suite of ten strong ground motion records, five of which with near-field characteristics, and (b) evaluation of the performance assessment results with observations reported in reconnaissance reports of the field performance of two neoclassical torsionally-sensitive historical buildings, located in Thessaloniki, Greece, which survived a major earthquake in the past.