A CONCEPTION OF CASUALTY CONTROL BASED SEISMIC DESIGN FOR BUILDINGS

摘要

Earthquake disaster is still the number one among all other natural disasters, particularly, in terms of destructive power in causing deaths. Can earthquake engineers control seismic casualties through the seismic design of buildings? For this purpose, a conception of casualty control based seismic design is presented and a "two-step decision-making" method is proposed for determining the optimum seismic design intensity (or ground-motion) for controlling both seismic death and economic losses. The key problems in establishing the model are to determine the appropriate socially acceptable level of earthquake mortality and establish the corresponding objective function and /or constraint conditions for optimum seismic design intensity. Ten different grades of socially acceptable mortality are initially suggested and the final socially seismic acceptable mortality level was proposed based on a questionnaire that was carried out nationwide in China. Finally, the effect of various grades of acceptable earthquake mortality on seismic design intensity is analyzed.