Rapid Estimation of Damage to Tall Buildings Using Near Real-Time Earthquake and Archived Structural Simulations

Abstract

This article outlines a new approach to rapidly estimate the damage to tall buildings immediately following a large earthquake. The preevent groundwork involves the creation of a database of structural responses to a suite of idealized ground-motion waveforms. The postevent action involves (1) rapid generation of an earthquake source model, (2) near real-time simulation of the earthquake using a regional spectral-element model of the earth and computing synthetic seismograms at tall building sites, and (3) estimation of tall building response (and damage) by determining the best-fitting idealized waveforms to the synthetically generated ground motion at the site and directly extracting structural response metrics from the database. Here, ground-velocity waveforms are parameterized using sawtoothlike wave trains with a characteristic period (T), amplitude (peak ground velocity, PGV), and duration (number of cycles, N). The proof-of-concept is established using the case study of one tall building model. Nonlinear analyses are performed on the model subjected to the idealized wave trains, with T varying from 0.5 s to 6.0 s, PGV varying from 0:125 m=s, and N varying from 1 to 5. Databases of peak transient and residual interstory drift ratios (IDR), and permanent roof drift are created. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the rapid response approach by applying it to synthetic waveforms from a simulated 1857-like magnitude 7.9 San Andreas earthquake. The peak IDR, a key measure of structural performance, is predicted well enough for emergency response decision making.

Correlation between Ground Motion and Building Response using California Earthquake Records

“…Coupled with real-time estimates of seismic ground motion (e.g., Wald et al 1999, Worden et al 2010, Wald et al (2008) proposed a real-time assessment of expected damage for critical facilities. More recently, Krishnan et al (2012) estimated damage for tall buildings present in a wide area by coupling ground motion predictions with a numerical analysis of building models. Most of these studies use numerical methods to model building response, and a "building-specific" prediction a) ISTerre, University of Grenoble, CNRS/IFSTTAR, France Earthquake Spectra, Volume 31, No.…”