Displacement-Based Seismic Assessment of the Likelihood of Failure of Reinforced Concrete Wall Buildings

To strengthen the resilience of our built environment, a good understanding of seismic risk is required. Probabilistic performance-based assessment is able to rigorously compute seismic risk and the advent of numerical computer-based analyses has helped with this. However, it is still a challenging process and as such, this study presents a simplified probabilistic displacement-based assessment approach for reinforced concrete wall buildings. The proposed approach is trialed by applying the methodology to 4-, 8-, and 12-story case study buildings, and results are compared with those obtained via multi-stripe analyses, with allowance for uncertainty in demand and capacity, including some allowance for modeling uncertainty. The results indicate that the proposed approach enables practitioners to practically estimate the median intensity associated with exceeding a given mechanism and the annual probability of exceeding assessment limit states. Further research to extend the simplified approach to other structural systems is recommended. Moreover, the research highlights the need for more information on the uncertainty in our strength and deformation estimates, to improve the accuracy of risk assessment procedures.

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