Efficient damage assessment for selected earthquake records based on spectral matching

Knowing the response of buildings to earthquakes is very important in order to ensure that a structure is able to withstand a given level of ground shaking. Thus, nonlinear dynamic earthquake engineering analyses are unavoidable and are preferable procedure in the seismic assessment of buildings. In order to estimate seismic performance on the basis of the hazard at the site where the structure is located, the selection of appropriate seismic input is known to be a critical step while performing this kind of analysis. In this paper, seismic analysis is performed for a four-story reinforced concrete ISPRA frame structure which is designed according to Eurocode 8 (EC8). A total of 90 different earthquake scenarios were selected, 30 for each of three target spectrums, EC8 spectrum, Uniform Hazard Spectrum (UHS), and Conditional Mean Spectrum (CMS). The aim of this analysis was to evaluate the average maximum Inter-story Drift Ratio (IDR) for each target spectrum. Time history analysis for every earthquake record was obtained and, as a result, IDR as the main measure of damage were presented in order to compare with defined performance levels of reinforced concrete bare frames.