Seismic Reliability of Rigid Frame Structures

Abstract

A reliability analysis method has been developed for plane‐frame structures with shear walls subjected to earthquake ground accelerations. The structural reliability is measured in terms of the probability that throughout the structure's lifetime, its response will remain linear. The earthquake ground acceleration is assumed to be a stationary and Gaussian random process with mean zero and a Kanai‐Tajimi spectrum. To describe the statistical variation of an individual earthquake's intensity, an extreme value distribution of Type II is employed, while the Poisson arrival law is used to model the earthquake occurrences. The modal analysis approach is taken to map the safe domain associated with individual critical member forces in the (transformed) generalized coordinate vector space. Then, the global reliability is obtained by estimating the probability that fhe generalized coordinate vector will remaifn in the domain representing the interaction of these safe domains throughout the structure's lifetime. Numerical examples are included.