Download or read book Multivariate Ground Motion Intensity Measure Models, and Implications for Structural Reliability Assessment written by Christophe Loth and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation focuses on developing models for ground motion intensity, to formulate improved design spectra for use in assessing the performance of buildings under earthquakes. Most seismic building codes and design guidelines are based on implicit performance goals that structures should achieve. Despite the significant uncertainty in future ground motion occurrence, building codes commonly check a structure's behavior under a single level of earthquake loading, quantified with a design spectrum. However, this explicit design check is often not defined with respect to the performance goals. The objective of this dissertation is to provide the link between the explicit design check and the implicit performance goals. Models for multivariate distributions of ground motion properties are refined (specifically, spectral accelerations at multiple periods and locations) and tractable methods to utilize those models to assess seismic reliability of systems are developed. Using structural reliability approaches, with environmental contours of spectral accelerations at multiple periods, a justification of the use of multiple conditional mean spectra for design checks is achieved. Performance assessment procedures for the response spectrum method as well as nonlinear response history analysis are proposed based on these conditional mean spectra. Finally, this dissertation provides an original spatial cross-correlation model for spectral accelerations at multiple periods, which allows one to conduct the design checks simultaneously for multiple structures in a region.