Safety evaluation of buildings with pre-existing damage

Under future seismic events, buildings with pre-existing damage may have lower performance capacity than non-damaged buildings. A method to evaluate building safety using Newmark's constant energy concept is proposed to address this issue, where safety is defined as the minimum strength required to survive a design-level seismic event. The method was validated using numerical simulations for a bilinear elastic perfectly plastic model and was found to have good agreement in 90% of cases.