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Published August 2004 | public
Book Section - Chapter

Comparative Study of Different Methods of Structural Damage Assessment

Abstract

In a modern performance-based earthquake engineering (PBEE) design framework, component fragility functions are used to relate parameters of structural response to damage. Since common structural response parameters are coupled to structural member properties, the usage of fragility functions in damage analysis after performing the structural analysis is inconsistent. The errors arising from such inconsistency do not seem to have been addressed previously. In the present study, we investigate this issue by comparing the results of damage estimation performed by three different methods. The first method, considered to be the most accurate, represents a coupled structural and damage analysis and utilizes randomized structural properties in the simulations for both the dynamic structural analysis and the damage analysis. The second, uncoupled, method samples the randomized structural properties twice during dynamic simulations, once for structural analysis and once for damage estimation. The third method is analogous to the second method but it uses a deterministic structural model for the dynamic simulation and uncertain structural properties for the damage analysis. Comparison of the results for a reinforced-concrete frame shows that relative to the first method, the second method provides reasonable estimates of the expected values and variances of the damage, while the third method underestimates the damage uncertainty. The variance estimated by a common approach based on a deterministic load and deterministic structure complemented by a probabilistic damage analysis is much less than the variance estimated by the first method.

Additional Information

This work was supported in part by the Earthquake Engineering Research Centers Program of the National Science Foundation under Award Number EEC-9701568 through the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center (PEER). This support is gratefully acknowledged. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the National Science Foundation.

Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 18, 2023