Classifications of Structural Types and Damage Patterns of Buildings for Earthquake Field Investigation

A lot of field investigations for damage to buildings are carried out after large earthquakes. In concordance with the variety of investigations, the building damage descriptions are really incoherent because a well-coordinated damage scale has not been prepared yet. This paper proposed a new chart for describing the building damage patterns by seismic vulnerability so as to help investigators to classify building damaged without a gross error. Furthermore, various damage scales defined by the organizations concerned can be compared with each other by using this chart as a common scale. Moreover, we proposed new damage vulnerability functions of various kinds of structure, the functions which can depict the relation between ground motion severity and damage degree of building.