Effects of uncertainty on the seismic collapse risk of light-frame wood buildings

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

1-1-2011

Abstract

Light-frame wood buildings are widely built in the United States. In the 1994 Northridge earthquake, about $20 billion of property losses and 24 deaths were due to damage to or collapse of wood construction. In order to evaluate the collapse risk of existing buildings or design new buildings with certain levels of margin against collapse, it is important to properly propagate the various sources of uncertainties in the risk assessment. Recently, several studies investigated the effects of uncertainty on the collapse risks of concrete and steel buildings. However, the effect on light-frame wood buildings is not clear. The effects of uncertainties on the seismic collapse risk of wood buildings are investigated in this study. Incremental dynamic analysis is used to determine the collapse capacity of the building. Record-to-record uncertainty of ground motion records are examined. Uncertainties in structural resistance are represented in typical wood-frame shear walls, which are modeled by a hysteresis model with 10 parameters, each of which is treated as a random variable. Epistemic uncertainty that is introduced by the modeling process is examined. This study provides more accurate estimation of the seismic collapse risk of light-frame wood buildings. Home owners or stake holders can be better informed about the risk of buildings due to the seismic hazard., © 2011 Taylor & Francis Group, London.

Publication Title

Applications of Statistics and Probability in Civil Engineering -Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Applications of Statistics and Probability in Civil Engineering

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