Seismic Damage Assessment of Regular Gravity Design Buildings

During the past earthquakes, different low ductile failure modes are observed in the gravity design structures and thus, the most of existing damage indices may fail to assess the damage of gravity design structures accurately in referring to the two main performance levels: immediate occupancy and ultimate limit state. Therefore, this study investigates the possible damage indices for the damage assessment of gravity design frames. For this purpose, among the existing damage indices in the literature, this study considers the inter-story drift and the natural period based damage indices. In addition, two new damage indices based on the wavelet based energy and the dominant inelastic period of a building are also considered in this study. Furthermore, the damage assessment results from the four damage indices for three gravity design buildings are compared and discussed. From the comparison, linear correlations between the inter-storey drift based damage index and the wavelet energy based index, and dominant inelastic period based damage index are observed. Finally, this study concludes based on the observations that no significant effects of number of inelastic cycles to the damage assessment results for low ductile structures. However, this study also highlights the effects of number of inelastic cycles to the damage for medium and high ductile structures.