PEER Reports

PEER Reports

Rehabilitation of Nonductile RC Frame Building Using Encasement Plates and Energy-Dissipating Devices, PEER Report 1999-12

Mehrdad Sasani
Vitelmo V. Bertero
James C. Anderson
1999

The main objective of the study reported heerin has been to develop a general seismic rehabilitation and upgrade approach for existing nonductile reinforced concrete (RC) moment frame buildings. A review of the design and as-built drawings of such existing buildings reveal that one of the main weaknesses is the lack of trasnverse (shear) reinforcement in the beam-column joints. Thus it was decided to attempt an upgrade approach centered on the use of a steep jacket placed around each of these joints. Furthermore, it was considered desirable that the study be conducted on...

U.S. Japan Workshop on the Effects of Near-Field Earthquake Shaking March 20–21, 2000 San Francisco, California, PEER Report 2000-02

Andrew S. Whittaker
2000

The January 1995 Hyogoken Nanbu earthquake devastated the port city of Kobe, Japan, with widespread damage to the built environment and great loss of life. The earthquake damaged buildings, bridges, industrial and transportation infrastructure, ports and harbors, and telecommunications systems. The direct and indirect losses from this earthquake were felt around the world.

Following the 1995 earthquake, the Japanese Ministry of Education, Science, Sports, and Culture initiated a five-year research program that addressed a wide variety of issues relating to the impact of a near-field...

Building Vulnerability Studies: Modeling and Evaluation of Tilt-up and Steel Reinforced Concrete Buildings, PEER Report 1999-13

John W. Wallace
Jonathan P. Stewart
Andrew S. Whittaker
1999

The California building inventory includes many different building types. Two common building types in this inventory are tilt-up buildings and reinforced concrete buildings with embedded steel frames (sometimes referred to as steel reinforced concrete, or SRC, buildings). Many of these buildings were built before the implementation of modern provisions for seismic design and may be susceptible to significant damage in moderate-to-strong earthquake ground motions. Given this potential vulnerability, a study was undertaken to assess modeling and evaluation approaches for each building type...

Seismic Evaluation and Retrofit of 230-kV Porcelain Transformer Bushings, PEER Report 1999-14

Amir S. Gilani
Andrew S. Whittaker
Gregory L. Fenves
Eric Fujisaki
1999

Two identical 230-kV porcelain transformer bushings and two retrofit details were selected for testing and evaluation. The class of the bushing tested was built in the mid-1980s and was known to be vulnerable to earthquake shaking. Resonance-search tests were conducted to determine the dynamic properties of the bushings. Static testing was undertaken to determine the limit states of the bushing and to assess the effectiveness of a retrofit detail. For static testing, the bushing was vertically mounted on a stiff frame and four target displacement orbits were used: unidirectional,...

Further Studies on Seismic Interaction in Interconnected Electrical Substation Equipment, PEER Report 2000-01

Armen Der Kiureghian
Kee-Jeung Hong
Jerome L. Sackman
2000

In a previous study, we investigated the effect of interaction between interconnected electrical substation equipment subjected to ground motions. Each equipment item was modeled as a system with distributed mass and stiffness properties and, through the use of a displacement shape function, was characterized by a single degree of freedom. Two kinds of connecting elements were considered: One was a linear spring-dashpot-mass element, representing a rigid bus conductor, and another was an extensible cable, representing a flexible conductor, in which the flexural rigidity and inertia effects...

Framing Earthquake Retrofitting Decisions: The Case of Hillside Homes in Los Angeles, PEER Report 2000-03

Detlof von Winterfeldt
Nels Roselund
Alicia Kitsuse
2000

The Northridge earthquake of 1994 created a surprising amount of damage to homes located on the hillsides of Los Angeles. Of approximately 10,000 hillside homes, 374 were damaged, some severely. This report examines three different representations, or “decision frames,” of the decision to improve the earthquake safety of hillside homes. The first decision frame is that of a safety engineer in a regulatory agency concerned with developing a city ordinance to reduce the future earthquake damage to hillside homes. The second decision frame is that of an individual homeowner, contemplating the...

An Evaluation of Seismic Energy Demand: An Attenuation Approach, PEER Report 2000-04

Chung-Che Chou
Chia-Ming Uang
2000

As a first step for the development of an energy-based procedure for seismic design and verification, establishing seismic demand in the form of absorbed energy spectra for an inelastic single- degree-of-freedom system was the main objective of this research. The absorbed energy ( Ea), not the input energy or hysteresis energy, was selected as the key demand parameter because it is not only related to the yield strength but also directly attributed to the damage of the structure.

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Performance-Based Evaluation of Exterior Reinforced Concrete Building Joints for Seismic Excitation, PEER Report 2000-05

Chandra Clyde
Chris P. Pantelides
Lawrence D. Reaveley
2000

Reinforced concrete (RC) buildings that were built in the 1960s behave in a nonductile manner and do not meet current seismic design criteria. In this report, beam-column joints of such nonductile buildings are investigated using several performance-based criteria. Four half-scale RC exterior joints were tested to investigate their behavior in a shear-critical mode. The joints were subjected to quasi-static cyclic loading, and their performance was examined in terms of lateral load capacity, drift, axial load reduction in the column at high levels of drift, joint shear strength, ductility...

Seismic Evaluation and Analysis of 230-kV Disconnect Switches, PEER Report 2000-06

Amir S. J. Gilani
Andrew S. Whittaker
Gregory L. Fenves
Chun-Hao Chen
Henry Ho
Eric Fujisak
Pacific Gas & Electric Company
2000

Five 230-kV disconnect switches were selected for testing and evaluation. Switches of this rating were known to be vulnerable to the effects of earthquake shaking. The class of the switches selected included two horizontal-break and three vertical-break switches. Switches with both porcelain and composite polymer insulators, and switches with both cast aluminum and welded steel base hardware were tested. First, an individual pole (out of three) of each switch was mounted directly on the simulator platform. Static and resonance search tests were conducted to determine the dynamic properties...

Cover-Plate and Flange-Plate Reinforced Steel Moment-Resisting Connections, PEER Report 2000-07

Taejin Kim
Andrew S. Whittaker
Amir S. J. Gilani
Vitelmo V. Bertero
Shakhzod M. Takhirov
2000

Five 230-kV disconnect switches were selected for testing and evaluation. Switches of this rating were known to be vulnerable to the effects of earthquake shaking. The class of the switches selected included two horizontal-break and three vertical-break switches. Switches with both porcelain and composite polymer insulators, and switches with both cast aluminum and welded steel base hardware were tested. First, an individual pole (out of three) of each switch was mounted directly on the simulator platform. Static and resonance search tests were conducted to determine the dynamic properties...