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This research aims to assess the seismic performance of existing tall buildings that were designed following guidelines that do not provide an understanding building performance. It intends to communicate seismic performance of buildings not only in terms of structural performance, but with measures that can influence decision making such as direct economic losses and downtime. This work seeks to explore strategies for increased resilience of existing tall buildings through innovative structural retrofits and by adopting non-structural building components that are more resilient to earthquake damage. Lastly, it intends to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of these strategies such that building owners and city officials can make understand the return on investing for adoption such measures and their impact on the overall resilience of a city.
At this stage of the project a methodology for assessing and enhancing the impact of tall building performance on the seismic resilience of cities in areas of high seismicity has been proposed. This methodology has been partly applied to a case study city: San Francisco. For this case study, the following outputs are avialable:
-Existing tall building database
-Archetype tall building design
-Probabilistic Seismic Harzard Analysis (PSHA) and relevant ground motions for a design level earthquake
-Analytical model for Non-Linear Response History Analysis (NLRHA)
-Building Performance Model using ATC-58's PACT for loss estimation
-Downtime estimates following REDi guidelines
-Strategies for increased resilience including structural retrofits and enhanced non-structural components.
Collaborators: Arup, Stanford University
Epicentre Staff Involved: Carlos Molina Hutt