Lifelines are essential to urban life as they include all kinds of facilities and systems as water, gas, fuel, power, communication and transportation. The scope of this paper is to evaluate the influence of the uncertainties of seismic load and damage state definition in system’s reliability. At first, a rapid pre-estimation of the reliability of the system just after the earthquake is conduct...

Bridge structure performance estimation under a seismic hazard can be significantly influenced by the level of modelling detail within the simulation of the soil structure interaction phenomenon. As the computational demands of such estimation greatly restricts the implementation of a detailed truncated FEM simulation of the semiinfinite soil domain, the Kelvin – Voigt Model within the framewor...

In the fall of 1998, the Federal Highway Administration of the U.S. Department of Transportation initiated a series of studies related to the seismic performance of the U.S. national highway system. The research conducted under this study is intended to provide improved tools for evaluating and assessing the social costs and impacts of earthquakes on highway systems and bridges, and to reduce t...

In order to evaluate the seismic performance of new-type composite exterior wallboard, a total of six exterior and interior wallboards were incorporated in the experiment of seismic performance. Seismic performance such as the stress process, damage mode, hysteresis and skeleton curve, load-carrying and ductility coefficient, damping and energy dissipation, stiffness degradation as well as mate...

In the seismic design of structures, capacity design is typically employed to ensure that a desirable ductile response is obtained. In this paper three different capacity design approaches for reinforced concrete coupled walls are investigated. For a simple case study building, the expected capacity design shear forces and bending moments are calculated using the different approaches. The resul...

Performance based seismic design (PBSD) is an alternative to code based approaches to design or evaluation of structures that fail to yield a more direct relationship between a seismic event and the corresponding structural performance of a building; this generally leads to over-conservatism. This paper presents a case study on the alternative procedures used in the performance based design of ...

Concentrically braced frames and eccentrically braced frames are efficient seismic resistant systems but they are generally prone to develop storey collapse mechanisms. As underlined in some previous papers with regard to eccentrically braced frames, this tendency depends on the overstrength factors and damage distribution capacity factors resulting from the use of common design procedures. In ...

In seismic resistance design, the design seismic motion is usually defined by elastic response spectra to reflect the characteristic in frequency. Whilst, either the phase of a reference seismic record or random phase is used in generation of artificial wave. The influence of phase on structural response can not be properly defined, as it is often omitted for linear elastic responses. But for t...

Bridge structure performance estimation under a seismic hazard can be significantly influenced by the level of modelling detail within the simulation of the soil structure interaction phenomenon. As the computational demands of such estimation greatly restricts the implementation of a detailed truncated FEM simulation of the semiinfinite soil domain, the Kelvin – Voigt Model within the framewor...

Seismic evaluations of many existing deck-truss bridges have revealed the vulnerability of their substructure and members of their superstructure. An innovative retrofit strategy developed by the authors includes replacement of the existing non-ductile end and lower-end bracing with ductile panels by incorporating energy dissipating devices to act as fuses, which can yield and dissipate energy ...