Initiations and Future Directions in the Development of Kinetic Structures for Earthquake Resistance

摘要

Currently it is widely acknowledged that buildings subjected to strong earthquake forces have in their design an additional complexity, in avoiding significant permanent damage that may lead to local or global collapse. But also recognizing the economic disadvantages of an exclusive elastic structural response, current earthquake design philosophies, as reflected within national and international earthquake building codes, promote the design of ductile structural systems able to undergo inelastic reverse cycles while sustaining their integrity. Thus capacity design states the aim of proportioning strength and stiffness such that inelastic behavior is localized in a controlled way so that other portions of the structure can respond elastically. This leads to the development of adaptable structures with predefined secondary areas that absorb and dissipate large amounts of the earthquake input energy through enhanced elastic or elastoplastic deformations. Along these lines the performance-based design approach typically accepts different levels of structural damage and consequently repairing costs as unavoidable result of inelastic behaviour depending on the earthquake intensity. Earthquake engineering has borrowed much from other engineering disciplines in its understanding of inelasticity and ductility, in developing probabilistic design approaches and in considering dynamic factors for earthquake structural safety. Such calculation approaches built in parallel on the development of generally applicable analysis methods, such as the capacity spectrum, pushover and displacement-based method [1].