PROBABILISTIC SEISMIC DEMAND ANALYSIS OF NONLINEAR STRUCTURES

Recent earthquakes in California have initiated improvement in current design philosophy and at present the civil engineering community is working towards development of performance-based earthquake engineering of structures. The objective of this study is to develop efficient, but accurate procedures for probabilistic analysis of nonlinear seismic behavior of structures. The proposed procedures help the near-term development of seismic-building assessments which require an estimation of seismic demand at a given intensity level. We also develop procedures to estimate the probability of exceedance of any specified nonlinear response level due to future ground motions at a specific site. This is referred as Probabilistic Seismic Demand Analysis (PSDA). The latter procedure prepares the way for the next stage development of seismic assessment that consider the uncertainties in nonlinear response and capacity. The proposed procedures require structure-specific nonlinear analyses for a relatively small set of recorded accelerograms and (site-specific or USGS-map-like) seismic hazard analyses. We have addressed some of the important issues of nonlinear seismic demand analysis, which are selection of records for structural analysis, the number of records to be used, scaling of records, etc. Initially these issues are studied through nonlinear analysis of structures for a number of magnitude-distance bins of records. Subsequently we introduce regression analysis of response results against spectral spectral acceleration, magnitude, duration, etc., which helps to resolve these issues more systematically.