Earthquake Safety Assessment Of Longtoushan Town Hospital In LuDian, Yun Nan Based On Damage Index

It is very important to give an accurate safety assessment for damaged buildings quickly after an earthquake. The assessment results can help people to find out hazardous buildings and to avoid more casualties. It can also tell people which buildings are safe and can be used. Then public sentiment can be stabilized and social order in the earthquake region can be restored as soon as possible. At present, the safety assessment of buildings after earthquakes mainly depends on experience and visual judgment of the experts. Such an approach is difficult to avoid the deviation of the assessment results due to the different understanding from various experts. In order to solve this problem, our research group developed a new method for earthquake safety assessment of buildings which has more objective index and then is more practical. This method established the correspondence between damage phenomenon and damage index of typical RC components through large number of experiments. Then an atlas was provided based on the damage photos of such components and this atlas can be used to evaluate the damage state of RC components by damage index. After that, the damage index and damage state of the whole building can be obtained by simply weighted adding the damage index of each component.As a part of such works, the main contents in this study are as follows:(1) Based on the OpenSEES software, the mechanical and damage properties of a series of typical RC beam and frame specimens were simulated. The simulation results were then compared with such results of the RC components obtained from a series of pseudo-static experiments. Then the appropriate numerical simulation method and parameters were determined.(2) The building of the Longtoushan Town Hospital (severely damaged during the Ludian earthquake in 2014) was choosen as a studying case. The finite element model of this building was established by OpenSEES and seismic damage was simulated. The damage indeies of each component in this building obtained by simulation were then compared with the photos of the same damaged components.(3) The appropriate method calculating the damage index and damage level of the whole building was studied and obtained by weighted adding the damage indies of each component in the building.(4) Finally, the influence on earthquake safety assessment result was addressed when the surveyed damage information is deficient.