A critical step in performance-based seismic design is the prediction and definition of earthquake performance using terms that are meaningful to building owners. Recently, economic impact, defined as the cost of repairing earthquake damage and the building downtime required to complete the repair work, has been adopted as a meaningful measure of building performance. To enable earthquake engin...

To achieve loss-reduction objectives and to enhance community and societal resilience in the event of earthquakes and other disasters, researchers and practitioners must take into account the broader societal environment in which loss-reduction solutions are applied. For that purpose, researchers at the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research ~MCEER! have developed two conc...

In this paper attention is given to the efficient numerical evaluation of the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research (PEER) performance-based earthquake engineering framework equations. In particular, potential problems in determining an adequate yet efficient region of integration are discussed. An algorithm called “Magnitude-oriented Adaptive Quadrature” (MAQ) is developed, which is an integ...

................................................................................................................. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS............................................................................................... iv PREFACE ..................................................................................................................... v TABLE OF CONTENTS ......................

This paper discusses the critical role of transportation systems in disaster recovery and the development of any long-term economic effects from earthquakes, based on insights from the Kobe earthquake and other disasters. The occurrence of long-term effects on regional economies has been controversial in the disaster literature and are for the most part ignored in earthquake loss estimation mod...

Most instruments used in seismological practice to record ground motion are pendulum seismographs, velocigraphs, or accelerographs. In most cases it is assumed that seismic instruments are only sensitive to the translational motion of the instrument’s base. In this study the full equation of pendulum motion, including the inputs of rotations and tilts, is considered. It is shown that tilting th...

The use of flexible roof diaphragms is very common in the United States, both for residential buildings and large-scale commercial buildings. Due to its simplicity, the traditional diaphragm design method is commonly used in diaphragm design, in particular for the design of diaphragms with relatively small dimensions. The traditional diaphragm design method assumes the axial chord forces develo...

Reduced dimensionality representation of strong ground motion records as a superposition of a relatively small number of pulses is studied. Such representation is obtained by the expansion of velocity in orthogonal wavelet series using the Fast Wavelet Transform, and approximation by only the largest energy terms in the series. The Coiflet 5 wavelet family is used, which is orthogonal, smooth a...

The objective of this paper is to showcase the progress of the earthquake engineering community during a decade-long effort supported by the National Science Foundation in the George E. Brown Jr., Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES). During the four years that NEES network operations have been headquartered at Purdue University, the NEEScomm management team has facilitated an u...