Proposals to account for the angle of seismic incidence when applying the PEER-PBEE methodology

Abstract

The paper discusses the overall effect of the angle of seismic incidence during the seismic safety assessment of reinforced concrete buildings employing state-of-the-art methods of analysis, and provides proposals on how to account for this effect. Particularly, the Performance Based Earthquake Engineering (PBEE) methodology developed by the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research (PEER) Centre is applied to six reinforced concrete buildings and the effect of the angle of seismic incidence is evaluated in all relevant stages of the procedure. The PEER-PBEE methodology provides a general framework for the probabilistic assessment of the seismic performance of individual buildings, it comprises four stages of analyses, and yields results that are of interest both for practitioner engineers and stakeholders. The angle of seismic incidence is involved in the second stage of the framework, which includes the structural analysis of the building, and primarily affects the resulting engineering demand parameters. Subsequently, the propagation of the effect of the angle of seismic incidence is also examined in the following two stages of the framework, which involve the damage and the loss analysis of the building. Different metrics of building performance are analysed in each stage of the framework, including two engineering demand parameters (in the structural analysis stage), the probability of collapse (in the damage analysis stage) and the expected annual loss of the building (in the loss analysis stage). Proposals to account for the angle of seismic incidence are provided based both on results obtained for each individual stage of the framework, as well as on the overall assessment procedure.