An efficient methodology to estimate probabilistic seismic damage curves

Abstract

The incremental dynamic analysis (IDA) is a powerful methodology that can be easily extended for calculating probabilistic seismic damage curves. These curves are metadata to assess the seismic risk of structures. Although this methodology requires a relevant computational effort, it should be the reference to correctly estimate the seismic risk of structures. Nevertheless, it would be of high practical interest to have a simpler methodology, based for instance on the pushover analysis (PA), to obtain similar results to those based on IDA. In this article, PA is used to obtain probabilistic seismic damage curves from the stiffness degradation and the energy of the nonlinear part of the capacity curve. A fully probabilistic methodology is tackled by means of Monte Carlo simulations with the purpose of establishing that the results based on the simplified proposed approach are compatible with those obtained with the IDA. Comparisons between the results of both approaches are included for a low- to midrise reinforced concrete building. The proposed methodology significantly reduces the computational effort when calculating probabilistic seismic damage curves.