A comparative application of different EC8-3 procedures for the seismic safety assessment of existing structures

Abstract

An application of the EC8-3 procedure for safety assessment is presented herein. Besides testing the applicability of the code procedure, this application aims to assess the consistency of the safety assessment results that are obtained. Based on the application of the EC8-3 procedure, the study assesses if the different methods of analysis that are permitted lead to similar safety results and identifies the factors that may affect these results. Furthermore, the results obtained by the EC8-3 procedure are complemented by a probabilistic approach yielding their corresponding fragility values. By comparing the D/C ratios and the probabilistic results, the application aims to determine if similar D/C ratios lead to similar probabilistic results. Furthermore, the application tries to determine if a correlation can be established between the D/C ratios and the expected fragility values.