Seismic Fragility Analysis of Shear Wall Structures

Keywords: Shear Wall Structures, Fragility Analysis, and Seismic Fragility Curves.

Abstract: This report presents a fragility analysis method to generate seismic fragility curves for shear wall structures. Uncertainties including randomness and modeling uncertainty in earthquake ground motion and structure are quantified by evaluating uncertainties in pertinent parameters which define earthquake load-structure system. The uncertainty in each parameter is characterized by several representative values to construct samples of earthquake load-structure system, and then the Latin hypercube sampling technique is utilized to combine these values to construct samples of earthquake load-structure system. For the response analysis, the modified Takeda hysteretic model is utilized to describe the nonlinear structural behavior. The nonlinear seismic analyses are performed in time domain for all samples of earthquake load-structure system to obtain an ensemble of nonstructural responses, which are then statistically analyzed. Five limit states representing various degrees of structural damage due to earthquake are established. Then, the statistics of the structural capacity corresponding to each limit state probability is evaluated on the basis of statistics of response and capacity for each limit state. The fragility curve is generated by evaluating the limit state probabilities at different levels of peak ground acceleration.