A gui framework for the development of fragility curves for a low-rise & medium-rise buildings

Abstract

“Earthquake’s do kill the people.” It is a clear misconception. Earthquakes never kill, but it is always the constructional failure which makes the situation worse and leads to the loss of life. Earthquake’s root to a huge economic loss apart from the tortuous pain of loss of lives. This calls for the need of seismic strengthening as the circumgyrations are inevitable. Seismic strengthening improves the structural safety but does not reduce the seismic response. Seismic strengthening is a pre-disaster assessment. But the need to study the observance of the existing buildings against the circumgyrations lead to a stew of post-disaster mitigation with pre-disaster planning known as Fragility analysis. Fragility analysis refers to the partial assessment of vulnerability of the buildings subjected to earthquake motions. In this study, the fragility curves are developed with the aid of Incremental dynamic analysis or Nonlinear dynamic analysis conducted on the model. The curves explain the conditional anticipation which outstrip adefinite limit of failure and therefore guesstimate the susceptibility of the structure. Fragility curves are very much useful in seismic loss estimation studies in earth quake prone zones. Two structural models four storey & six storey 3D open frame buildings were considered.The structural models are designed for dead, live and seismic loads according to the Indian Code. A set of 5 Farfield ground motions scaled from 0.1 to 1 with an increment of 0.1 are used in the Incremental dynamic analysis using SAAP2000. Four performance levels, namely Fully Operational (FO), Immediate Occupancy (IO), Life Safety (LS) and Collapse Prevention (CP) were considered and monitored in the analysis using MATLAB. The objective of the study is to develop the fragility curves for a low rise (G+3) and medium rise (G+5) building models using the Graphical User Interface (GUI) in MATLABR2016a considering the four selected performance levels. The study depicts the use of Hybrid method (combination of Expertise & analytical methods) for the development of Fragility Curves.