New Earthquake Engineering Study Findings Have Been Reported from Imperial College London (Dimensionless fragility analysis of seismic acceleration demands through low-order building models)

2019 JUL 15 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Engineering Daily News -- A new study on Engineering - Earthquake Engineering is now available. According to news reporting originating from London, United Kingdom, by NewsRx correspondents, research stated, “This paper deals with the estimation of fragility functions for acceleration-sensitive components of buildings subjected to earthquake action. It considers ideally coherent pulses as well as real non-pulselike ground-motion records applied to continuous building models formed by a flexural beam and a shear beam in tandem.”

Our news editors obtained a quote from the research from Imperial College London, “The study advances the idea of acceleration-based dimensionless fragility functions and describes the process of their formulation. It demonstrates that the mean period of the Fourier Spectrum, Tm, is associated with the least dispersion in the predicted dimensionless mean demand. Likewise, peak ground acceleration, PGA-, and peak ground velocity, PGV-based length scales are found to be almost equally appropriate for obtaining efficient universal’ descriptions of maximum floor accelerations. Finally, this work also shows that fragility functions formulated in terms of dimensionless -terms have a superior performance in comparison with those based on conventional non-dimensionless terms (like peak or spectral acceleration values). This improved efficiency is more evident for buildings dominated by global flexural type lateral deformation over the whole intensity range and for large peak floor acceleration levels in structures with shear-governed behaviour.”

According to the news editors, the research concluded: “The suggested dimensionless fragility functions can offer a universal’ description of the fragility of acceleration-sensitive components and constitute an efficient tool for a rapid seismic assessment of building contents in structures behaving at, or close to, yielding which form the biggest share in large (regional) building stock evaluations.”

For more information on this research see: Dimensionless fragility analysis of seismic acceleration demands through low-order building models. Bulletin of Earthquake Engineering, 2019;17(7):3815-3845. Bulletin of Earthquake Engineering can be contacted at: Springer, Van Godewijckstraat 30, 3311 Gz Dordrecht, Netherlands. (Springer - www.springer.com; Bulletin of Earthquake Engineering - http://www.springerlink.com/content/1570-761x/)

The news editors report that additional information may be obtained by contacting C. Malaga-Chuquitaype, Imperial College London, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, London SW7 2AZ, United Kingdom. Additional authors for this research include M.E. Psaltakis, J. Wu and G. Kampas.

The direct object identifier (DOI) for that additional information is: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10518-019-00615-2. This DOI is a link to an online electronic document that is either free or for purchase, and can be your direct source for a journal article and its citation.

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