PEER Reports

PEER Reports

Simulating the Inelastic Seismic Behavior of Steel Braced Frames Including the Effects of Low-Cycle Fatigue, PEER Report 2010-104

Yuli Huang
Stephen A. Mahin
2010

This report describes simulations of the inelastic seismic behavior of steel braced frames, including the effects of low-cycle fatigue. For steel braced frames under complex loading conditions, a wide variety of behavior mechanisms and failure modes may occur for each type of member and connection. Thus, numerical models that assess the initiation and propagation of failure during cyclic loading need to account for multi-axial states of material nonlinearity, local and global buckling and the exhaustion of the ability of the material to deform inelastically caused by low-cycle fatigue....

Structural Engineering Reconnaissance of the April 6, 2009, Abruzzo, Italy, Earthquake, and Lessons Learned, PEER Report 2010-105

M. Selim Günay
Khalid M. Mosalam
2010

In April 2009, a moment magnitude Mw=6.3 earthquake struck the central region of Italy near the city of L’Aquila. While the earthquake was tragic — 305 people killed, 1500 injured, and thousands of buildings destroyed — its aftermath provides lessons for earthquake professionals. Within 10 km of the epicenter, the recorded horizontal peak ground acceleration exceeded 0.35g and the ground shaking had high-frequency content with relatively short duration. The damage indicated strong effects of site conditions, where heavy damage occurred to structures founded on young sediments....

Verification of Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Analysis Computer Programs, PEER Report 2010-106

Patricia Thomas
Ivan Wong
Norman Abrahamson
2010

Probabilistic seismic hazard analysis (PSHA) has become a fundamental tool in assessing seismic hazards and for estimating seismic design and seismic safety evaluation of ground motions. It is used both on a site-specific basis for important and critical facilities and on a national scale for building codes. This report describes a project to test and verify the numerical approaches and software used in PSHA. The project was sponsored by the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research (PEER) Center’s Lifelines Program. A Working Group was organized and members tested their own computer codes...

Performance and Reliability of Exposed Column Base Plate Connections for Steel Moment-Resisting Frames, PEER Report 2010-107

Ady Aviram
Bozidar Stojadinovic
Armen Der Kiureghian
2010

Many steel buildings, especially those with special moment-resisting frames (SMRFs), suffered failures at their column base connections during the 1995 Kobe, Japan, and the 1994 Northridge, and 1989 Loma Prieta, California, earthquakes. These failures prompted a need to investigate the reliability of current column base designs.

A parametric study was carried out on a typical low-rise building in Berkeley, California, featuring a SMRF with column base rotational stiffness varying from pinned to fixed. Pushover and nonlinear time history analyses carried out on the SMRFs indicate...

Probabilistic Tsunami Hazard in California, PEER Report 2010-108

Hong Kie Thio
Paul Somerville
Jascha Polet
2010

Tsunami hazard maps are used to compute the tsunami inundation hazard for California using a hybrid approach of numerical tsunami simulations and probabilistic integration of the hazard. The earthquake sources include large subduction zone sources around the Pacific Rim. Our method uses a two-step process: the first consists of the computation of probabilistic offshore waveheights based on several thousands of scenario calculations that include both epistemic uncertainty through the use of logic trees as well as aleatory variability, by applying a standard deviation (sigma) to the...

Report of the Seventh Joint Planning Meeting of NEES/E-Defense Collaboration on Earthquake Engineering. Held at the E-Defense, Miki, and Shin-Kobe, Japan, September 18-19, 2009, PEER Report 2010-109

Convened by the Hyogo Earthquake Engineering Research Center (NIED), NEES Consortium, Inc.
2010

Following an agreement between the Japan Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) and the US National Science Foundation (NSF), the First Planning Meeting for NEES/E-Defense Collaboration on Earthquake Engineering Research was held in 2004. This meeting laid the groundwork for a five-year joint research program related to improving understanding and reducing the seismic vulnerability of bridges and steel buildings. To formalize the collaboration, two Memorandums of Understanding (MOU) were executed, one between NSF and MEXT in September 2005 and one between the...

Seismic Performance Assessment and Probabilistic Repair Cost Analysis of Precast Concrete Cladding Systems for Multistory Buildings, PEER Report 2010-110

Jeffrey P. Hunt
Bozidar Stojadinovic
2010

Recent probabilistic evaluations have shown that the repair costs for typical multistory buildings after minor and moderate earthquakes are heavily influenced by the amount of nonstructural damage. However, most of the efforts in nonlinear dynamic modeling focus on representing the behavior of structural elements and do not include the effects of nonstructural elements. An important nonstructural element is the exterior cladding system. Analytical models of three typical precast concrete cladding designs attached to the nine-story SAC building are created in OpenSees. The effect of the...

Modeling and Acceptance Criteria for Seismic Design and Analysis of Tall Buildings, PEER Report 2010-111

2010

In October 2006, the Applied Technology Council (ATC) began work on a contract assisting the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center (PEER) in developing guidelines for the seismic design of tall buildings as part of the PEER Tall Buildings Initiative. The purpose of this work was to prepare recommendations for modeling the behavior of tall building structural systems and acceptance values for use in seismic design. Shortly thereafter, ATC secured additional funding on behalf of PEER from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), through the Building Seismic Safety Council (...

Guidelines for Performance-Based Seismic Design of Tall Buildings, Version 2.03, PEER Report 2017-06

Ron Hamburger
Jack Moehle
Jack Baker
Jonathan Bray
C.B. Crouse
Greg Deierlein
John Hooper
Marshall Lew
Joe Maffei
Stephen Mahin
James Malley
Farzad Naeim
Jonathan Stewart
John Wallace
2017

These Seismic Design Guidelines for Tall Buildings present a recommended alternative to the prescriptive procedures for seismic design of buildings contained in the ASCE 7 standard and the International Building Code (IBC) . The intended audience includes structural engineers and building officials engaged in seismic design and review of tall buildings. Properly executed, these Guidelines are intended to result in buildings that are capable of reliably achieving the seismic performance objectives intended by ASCE 7, and in some aspects, and where...

“R” Package for Computation of Earthquake Ground-Motion Response Spectra, PEER Report 2017-09

Pengfei Wang
Jonathan P. Stewart
Yousef Bozorgnia
David M. Boore
Tadahiro Kishida
2017

Earthquake ground motions are typically recorded with one vertical and two horizontal components. It has become standard practice to represent the horizontal component of ground shaking in a manner that recognizes a range of amplitudes with changing azimuths. These variable amplitudes can be generically denoted RotDxx, where xx indicates the percentile of the horizontal amplitude range. RotDxx representations of ground motion are used with amplitude parameters (peak acceleration and velocity) as well as response spectral ordinates for a range of oscillator periods. The use of RotDxx ground...