Study On The Performance Level Of Reinforced Concrete Structure

According to the investigation on damage due to earthquakes during the last 10 years, earthquakes are making more economical losses in recent years besides human casualty. To accommodate this trend, then the concept of Performance Based Seismic Design (PBSD) is proposed. Although the concept of PBSD has been incorporated into seismic codes in many countries, a quantitative measure is still needed to check if the designed structures can achieve the expected performance level. Therefore, the study on quantitative measure for PBSD bears very practical and realistic importance.This paper is based on the framework of decision-based earthquake engineering which is proposed by Prof. Zifa Wang. Based on the results of my own analysis and those of previous studies all over the world, the formulas for calculating of the average annual loss ratio and human casualty ratio for a structure are proposed. The main contents of this paper are listed as follows:1)summarizing the new characteristics of modern earthquakes and current status of studies on PBSD and analyze the advantages and disadvantages of various related studies;2)brief introduction to the framework of decision-based earthquake engineering and the method of Incremental Dynamic Analysis(IDA);3)Based on the results by IDARC₂D 5.0 and IDA, calculating the distribution of damage index for 6 different RC frame structures subjected to the excitation of a series of earthquake records scaled to several levels, and then obtaining the probabilistic distribution function of damage index by regression analysis;4)calculating the average annual loss ratio and human casualty ratio of a structure designed under modern seismic code affected by future earthquakes, and compare them to the expected level.The result of this study has potential application value in the selection of fortification criterion during the seismic design.