A landmark experimental program was conducted to advance the understanding of nonstructural system performance during earthquakes. The centerpiece of this effort involved shake table testing a full-scale five-story reinforced concrete building furnished with a broad variety of nonstructural components and systems (NCSs) including complete and operable egress, mechanical and electrical systems, facades, and architectural layouts. The building-NCS system was subjected to a suite of earthquake motions of increasing intensity, while base-isolated and then fixed at its base. In this paper, the major components of the test specimen, including the structure and its NCSs, the monitoring systems, and the seismic test protocol are described in detail. Important response and damage characteristics of the structure are also presented. A companion paper describes the damage observed for the various NCSs and correlates these observations with the structure's response.

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Nonstructural components and systems (NCSs) provide little to no load bearing capacity to a building; however, they are essential to support its operability. As a result, 75–85% of the initial building financial investment is associated with these elements. The vulnerability of NCSs even during low intensity earthquakes is repeatedly exposed, resulting in large economic losses, disruption of building functionality, and concerns for life safety. This paper describes and classifies damage to NCSs observed during landmark shake table tests of a full-scale five-story reinforced concrete building furnished with a broad variety of NCSs. This system-level test program provides a unique dataset due to the completeness and complexity of the investigated NCSs. Results highlight that the interactions between disparate nonstructural systems, in particular displacement compatibility, as well as the interactions between the NCSs and the building structure often govern their seismic performance.

[1] Rotational along with translational and strain measurements are essential for a complete description of the motion of a deformable body in a seismic event. We propose a new seismogeodetic approach where collocated high-rate GPS and accelerometer measurements are combined to estimate permanent and dynamic coseismic ground tilts at a point, whereas at present, only dynamic tilts are measured with either a dense seismic array or an expensive ring laser gyroscope. We estimate point tilts for a five-story structure on a shake table subjected to 13 earthquake strong motion records of increasing intensity. For the most intense record from the 2002 M7.9 Denali earthquake, we observe a peak-to-peak dynamic tilt of 0.12 ı and a permanent tilt of 0.16 ı for the structure's roof. Point tilts derived from networks of collocated GPS and accelerometers can be used to estimate the rotational component of the seismic wavefield for improved earthquake source characterization. Citation: Geng, J., D.Melgar, Y. Bock, E. Pantoli, and J. Restrepo (2013), Recovering coseismic point ground tilts from collocated high-rate

This paper examines the seismic response of a cooling tower supported on four isolation/restraint (I/R) mounts. The tower was mounted on the roof of a fivestory reinforced concrete building built at full-scale and tested on the large outdoor unidirectional shake table at the University of California, San Diego. The building was tested in two phases: (1) base-isolated and (2) fixed-base. In each phase, the building was subjected to six earthquake input ground motions reproduced by the shake table. In this paper, the measured response of the cooling tower and its supporting system are analyzed and compared to current code provisions.