EVALUATION OF THE EFFECTS OF MODELING UNCERTAINTIES ON THE SEISMIC PERFORMANCE OF REINFORCED CONCRETE FRAMES

In recent years, researchers have paid much attention to evaluate the effects of modeling parameters in steel frames; however this subject has been less studied in reinforced concrete (RC) frames. The modeling parameters are one of the important parts of the epistemic uncertainties in probabilistic assessment of structures that are obtained from physical and geometrical features of the structure; for example ASCE 41-13 (2014) introduces the parameters of nonlinear moment-rotation behavior of RC’s beam column elements as a function of longitudinal and transverse reinforcement and also axial and shear demand. The modeling parameters are indeed the parameters obtained from backbone curves of the beam-column elements; which have been previously introduced by Ibarra et al. (2005) and include plastic rotation ( θp ), post cappingrotation ( θpc ),post yield hardening stiffness(Mc/My ) and etc. Evaluating the effects of these parameters can be executed by analyzing several RC frames under different values of the mentioned parameters. This study is aimed at evaluating the uncertainty effects in some of modeling parameters on the seismic performance of RC frames by using incremental dynamic analysis (IDA) and obtaining the collapse fragility curves of four frames with different story heights. Moreover, the importance of proper correlation assumption between different modeling parameters, and also the performance level in which the assessment is executed will be discussed in this paper.

Keywords:

Modeling Parameter , Uncertainty , Beam-Column , Seismic Performance , Reinforced Concrete Frame