Quasistatic Seismic Damage Indicators for RC Structures from Dissipating Energies in Tangential Subspaces

This paper applies recent research on structural damage description to earthquake-resistant design concepts. Based on the primary design aim of life safety, this work adopts the necessity of additional protection aims for property, installation, and equipment. This requires the definition of damage indicators, which are able to quantify the arising structural damage. As in present design, it applies nonlinear quasistatic (pushover) concepts due to code provisions as simplified dynamic design tools. Substituting so nonlinear time-history analyses, seismic low-cycle fatigue of RC structures is approximated in similar manner. The treatment will be embedded into a finite element environment, and the tangential stiffness matrix KT in tangential subspaces then is identified as the most general entry for structural damage information. Its spectra of eigenvalues λ i or natural frequencies ω i of the structure serve to derive damage indicators D i, applicable to quasistatic evaluation of seismic damage. Because det KT = 0 denotes structural failure, such damage indicators range from virgin situation Di = 0 to failure Di = 1 and thus correspond with Fema proposals on performance-based seismic design. Finally, the developed concept is checked by reanalyses of two experimentally investigated RC frames