Deterministic and stochastic approach in estimating the reliability of civil-engineering structures submitted to earthquakes

摘要

Earthquake regulations are recent and are mostly devoted to the design of new buildings. It is noteworthy that many buildings are older than the seismic regulations and that it is often difficult to forecast their ability to withstand earthquakes. The present paper is devoted to the study of the ability of existing building to withstand earthquakes, taking into account the non-linear behaviour of the building and the randomness of the physical properties of the building. The case under study is a masonry infilled R/C frame structure. All studies use mainly the finite element method. The deterministic nonlinear behaviour is treated in the first part. A comparison is effected between the results obtained by a pushover method and the results obtained by a simulation of the dynamic response behaviour under earthquake excitation. The second part presents results on the random linear behaviour of the same structure obtained by a non-parametric approach and a Monte-Carlo procedure in modal coordinates. It is then possible to compare the dispersion induced by the random character of physical properties to the differences between the result of the deterministic approaches.