Simulation of Strong Ground Motions for Seismic Fragility Evaluation of Nonstructural Components in Hospitals

Keywords: Methodologies.  Simulations.  Strong ground motions.  Earthquake scenarios.  Seismic scenarios.  Hospitals.  Acute care hospitals.  United States.  Fragility curves.  Nonstructural components.  Hazard levels.  Vertical ground motion.  Horizontal ground motion.  Pseudo-spectral accelerations (PSA).  Specific barrier models.

Abstract: This study discusses the methodology used to simulate ensembles of strong ground motions representative of scenario earthquake events for hypothetical hospital sites on the west and east coasts of the United States.  These simulated ground motions will be used in the MCEER Hospital Project to develop analytical and experimental fragility curves of nonstructural components contained in acute care facilities.  The standardized accelerograms are generated for four different hazard levels: 2%, 5%, 10% and 20% probabilities of exceedance of pseudo-spectral acceleration (PSA) in 50 years.  The methods used in the simulation of the horizontal and vertical ground motions are presented.  For each earthquake event, three acceleration components are simulated, i.e., fault-normal and fault-parallel horizontal components, and the corresponding vertical acceleration.  This report includes an abstract, appendices, references, tables and illustrations.