Infills can highly influence the seismic response of a Reinforced Concrete (RC) building: generally speaking, their presence leads to an increase in global stiffness and strength, but their brittle behavior can result in an increase of displacement demand if a certain threshold of seismic intensity is overcome. Moreover, presence of infills often leads to a change in the collapse mechanism comp...

Rooted in structural dynamics theory, three approximate procedures for estimating seismic demands for bridges crossing fault-rupture zones and deforming into their inelastic range are presented: modal pushover analysis �MPA�, linear dynamic analysis, and linear static analysis. These procedures estimate the total seismic demand by superposing peak values of quasi-static and dynamic parts. The p...

The Bolu viaduct is a 2.3 km long seismically isolated structure whose construction was nearly complete when it was struck by the 1999 Duzce earthquake in Turkey. It suffered complete failure of the seismic isolation system and narrowly avoided total collapse due to excessive superstructure movement. This paper presents an evaluation of the design of the viaduct’s seismic isolation system and a...

Water storage tanks not designed explicitly for seismic loading could require retrofit. One of the common ways of retrofit include some structural change in the lateral load resisting system that could be expensive and requires the tank to be out of service for relatively long time. This paper introduces a novel method to reduce seismic demand on tank’s wall without structural intervention. Thi...

The main objective of this article is to assess the expected seismic damage in reinforced concrete buildings from a probabilistic point of view by using Monte Carlo simulation. To do that, the seismic behavior of the building is studied by using random capacity obtained by considering the mechanical properties of the materials as random variables. Starting from the capacity curves, one can obta...

This paper aims to investigate the effects of motion duration on the structural seismic demands, seeking potential correlations between motion durations and structural responses at several seismic intensity levels. Three seismic intensity levels with 100years, 475years, and 2475years earthquake return periods (RPs) are first considered for correlation computations. Spectrally matched ground mot...

1 T a b l e o f C o n t e n t s Abstract i i Acknowledgments viii Problem and Thesis Objective I Review of Previous Work 2 Multi-Criteria Optimal Design 2 Reliability-Based Design Earthquake Identification 6 A Time Variant Approach to Performance-Based Engineering 9 Seismic Performance Evaluation For Steel Moment Frames 10 Optimal Probabilistic Seismic Demand Models For Typical Highway Overpass...

The seismic performance of elliptic braced moment resisting frame (ELBRF) is assessed here and is found that the structural behavior is improved and is of free of architectural space. The demand for seismic performance of ELBRF is estimated through conventional pushover methods of 3, 5, 7, and 10-story ELBRF frames and they are compared with special moment resisting frames (SMRF) and X-Braced C...

Because of difficulty in inspection and retrofit of foundation in comparison with other elements, the common design philosophy is to avoid any nonlinear deformation in the foundation. This paper shows that by employing controlled foundation nonlinearity, in predetermined sections with arrangements for inspection and retrofit, it is possible to reduce seismic demand on superstructure. Localizing...