A moderately refined and efficient regional seismic damage simulation method considering building irregularity

Abstract

Irregular buildings that occupy a certain proportion on regional scales are prone to suffer serious damage from earthquakes due to the influence of lateral-torsional coupling effect. However, the current regional seismic damage simulation methods are mainly based on two-dimensional simplified models, which cannot take into account the spatial characteristics of irregular buildings. In addition, the refined finite-element method is unsuitable for the simulation of a host of buildings on a regional scale. This paper proposes a moderately refined seismic damage simulation method for building groups with high efficiency to consider the spatial irregularity characteristics of structures. The moderately refined layer element model is established to simulate the nonlinear behavior of each story of the building with irregular plan configurations. For the elevation-irregular structures, the proposed model can also be used by properly combining the elements representing various stories in series. Additionally, a simplified approach of considering P-∆ effect is incorporated by adding equivalent lateral forces to nodes and the method for determining the hysteretic parameter and backbone curve parameters of the proposed model is illustrated. Then, a two-level accelerated dynamic analysis method is proposed to reduce computation time for seismic damage simulation in region, which involves a perturbation nonlinear dynamic governing equation for a single structure and an OpenMP parallel solution strategy for structure groups. Finally, the two individual numerical examples and the seismic damage simulation for a region are performed to demonstrate the validity and efficiency of the proposed method.