Seismic Assessment of R/C Building Structure through Nonlinear Probabilistic Analysis with High‐performance Computing

This paper presents a probabilistic seismic demand analysis of a three dimensional R/C building model subjected to tri‐axial earthquake excitation. Realistic probability distributions are assumed for the main structural and material properties and for the ground motion Intensity Measure (IM) Sa(T1. Natural ground motions are used in the analyses to represent the inherent randomness in the earthquake ground motion time histories. Monte Carlo simulations are performed to account for the record‐to‐record variability and Tornado diagrams are used to represent the uncertainty induced in the response by the basic uncertainties in the structural properties. In order to perform a probabilistic study on three‐dimensional engineering demand parameters (EDPs), a large number of ensemble time history analyses were carried out using the TeraGrid high‐performance computing resources available at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Early results show that for the testbed building used in this study, uncertainty in the s...