Study on the Fragility of Building Structures in Taiwan

Abstract

This paper describes procedures of damage assessment for building structures in Taiwan Earthquake Loss Estimation System (TELES), and focuses on evaluation of parameters used in the building damage assessment. The objective of this paper is to define the building classification and provide the fragility functions of the general building structures in Taiwan by using the available data. The organization of this paper is as follows. First, the types of the building structures in Taiwan are reviewed and a classification based on the available data to be implemented in TELES is proposed. Second, the description of failure mechanisms and criteria in different damage states adopted in this research are summarized. Third, the theoretical methodology of the fragility analysis for the proposed building classes and examples for some typical building structures are presented. Parameters for describing the fragility functions for each class are also generated and shown in the paper.

Influence of ground-motion correlation on probabilistic assessments of seismic hazard and loss: sensitivity analysis

“…They showed that the results of loss estimation are relatively insensitive to the spatial resolution of the building stock for exposure at grid sizes less than 2 km × 2 km. It has been assumed that all cells contain the same number of buildings, which are typical for Taiwan (Liao et al 2006), namely: steel-braced frames of four to seven stories.…”

“…The components of variability related to the seismic demand and the capacity are discussed by Porter et al (2002); Crowley et al (2005); Bommer and Crowley (2006). In our study, we used the PGA-based fragility curves developed by Liao et al (2006). The authors reviewed the types of building structures in Taiwan and proposed the classification to be implemented in the Taiwan Earthquake Loss Estimation System (TELES).…”

“…Analytical fragility curves were developed by nonlinear static analysis using computer models of the structures. Only the uncertainty of the ground motion parameter was used by Liao et al (2006) to represent the total variability of the damage state. In our analysis, the vulnerability curves should contain only variability related to characteristics of structures to avoid the counting the ground-motion variability twice .…”

“…Porter et al (2002) showed that the influence of uncertainties in ground shaking (intensity of shaking and details of ground motion at a given level) on the overall uncertainty in seismic performance (repair cost) is approximately equal to the influence of uncertainty in the capacity of building to resist the damage. Therefore, because the analysis of the relation between ground-motion variability and the variability related to the construction properties is outside the scope of our study, we assume that the values of standard deviations β given by Liao et al (2006) may be used to represent only uncertainty in the building capacity. We used the similar assumption in our previous study .…”

“…We used the similar assumption in our previous study . The parameters of fragility curves (Median PGA for damage states and standard deviations) were taken from Liao et al (2006) (Table IV, Label RMM, low-code variant) and are listed in Table 5.…”