The Earthquake Engineering Online Archive

PEER testbed study on a laboratory building: exercising seismic performance assessment

Comerio, Mary C.

PEER-2005/12, Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center, University of California, Berkeley, 2005, pdf (400/P33/2005-12)

From 2002 to 2004 (years five and six of a ten-year funding cycle), the PEER Center organized the majority of its research around six testbeds. Two buildings and two bridges, a campus, and a transportation network were selected as case studies to "exercise" the PEER performance-based earthquake engineering methodology. All projects involved interdisciplinary teams of researchers, each producing data to be used by other colleagues in their research. The testbeds demonstrated that it is possible to create the data necessary to populate the PEER performance-based framing equation, linking the hazard analysis, the structural analysis, the development of damage measures, loss analysis, and decision variables. This report describes one of the building testbeds--the University of California Science Building. The project was chosen to focus attention on the consequences of losses of laboratory contents, particularly downtime. The UC Science testbed evaluated the earthquake hazard and the structural performance of a well-designed, recently built reinforced concrete laboratory building using the OpenSees platform. Researchers conducted shaking table tests on samples of critical laboratory contents in order to develop fragility curves used to analyze the probability of losses based on equipment failure. The UC Science testbed undertook an extreme case in performance assessment--linking performance of contents to operational failure. The research shows the interdependence of building structure, systems, and contents in performance assessment and highlights where further research is needed.

Available online: http://peer.berkeley.edu/publications/peer_reports/reports_2005/PEER_512_COMERIO_testbed.pdf