NEHRP Clearinghouse

Title
Evaluation of the Seismic Performance of a Ten-Story RC Building during the Whittier Narrows Earthquake.
File
PB93114783.pdf
Author(s)
Miranda, E.; Bertero, V. V.
Source
National Science Foundation, Washington, DC.; California Div. of Mines and Geology, Sacramento.; Kajima Inst. of Construction Technology, Tokyo (Japan)., October 1991, 112 p.
Identifying Number(s)
UCB/EERC-91/10
Abstract
The report summarizes studies evaluating the response of an existing instrumented ten-story Reinforced Concrete (RC) building, which was subjected to earthquake ground motions of what can be considered moderate damage potential during the 1987 Whittier Narrows earthquake. The seismically laterally-resistant structural system consists of moment-resisting frames in the N-S (longitudinal) direction and RC shear walls in the E-W (transverse) direction. It was designed according to the 1970 Uniform Building Code (UBC). The ultimate goal of the studies has been to evaluate the reliability of present methods of estimating the performance of existing buildings. To achieve this, the following objectives were pursued: (1) evaluation of the reliability of presently available system identification techniques for inferring the dynamic characteristics of a building from its recorded responses; (2) assessment of the reliability of analytical models and methods presently available for conducting analyses of the seismic performance of buildings; (3) evaluation, through static and dynamic (time-history) analyses, of the strength and deformation capacity of the building as well as its response, overall and local, and particularly the damage that the building could suffer when subjected to future critical ground motions; and (4) assessment of the implications for present EQ-resistant design practice of the results obtained.
Keywords
Reinforced concrete; Framed structures; Earth movements; Elastic analysis; Displacement; Soil-structure interactions; Loads (Forces); Structural members; Whittier Narrows Earthquake; Ductility; Earthquake resistant structures; Structural vibration; California; Earthquake damage; Concrete structures; Seismic effects; Building codes; Fourier transformation; Dynamic response; Spectrum analysis; Earthquake engineering; Dynamic structural analysis