39th

t
IABSE Symp
posium – Enggineering the Future
F
Septemberr 21‐23 2017, Vancouver, Canada
C

Seismic Fragility
F Curves using
u Natural and Synthetiic Ground
d Motion
ns
Pradip Sarkaar, Robin Daavis
National Insstitute of Tecchnology Rou
urkela, Odisha, India

D.C. Haran Pragalath

P
Vel Tech Dr. RR & Dr. SR
R Technical University,
U Ch
hennai, TN, India

Contact:
C sarkaarp@nitrkl.ac.in
n

Abstract
A
Fragility currves are use eful tools fo
or the probaabilistic asseessment of tthe seismic performancce of
buildings. Nonlinear strructural analyses with u uncertaintiess in load and
d resistancee are requireed to
develop fragility curvess. A statisticcally sufficieent number of earthquake ground motion reccords
should ideally be obtain ned from past records of o the regionn of interest to have a satisfying fragility
curve. Howeever, the nu umber of avvailable earthquake reco ords in many seismicallyy active zonnes is
limited. In such
s a situaation, use off the syntheetic ground motions is an accepted d alternativee for
fragility
f anaalyses of bu uildings. Thiss paper com mpares the seismic fragility curvess obtained from
synthetic an nd natural ground motio on records. It is found that
t synthettic ground motions
m resuult in
conservative e fragility cu
urves with leesser disperrsion in driftt demand wwhen compared with naatural
recorded gro ound motion ns.
Keywords: synthetic
s gro
ound motion
n, uncertaintty, fragility curve;
c perforrmance leveel; dispersion
n.

groundd motions. On n the other hand,

h many reecent
1 Introduction studiess (Rajeev and Tesfamariam m, 2012; Wu et
e al.,
Fragility curvves are used as an evaluaation tool in 2012; etc.)
e have developed fragility curves fo
or RC
the
t assessment of the seismic perfformance of buildingg frames usin
ng natural gro
ound motion data.
d
buildings. TheT assessmment of th his seismic An exteensive literatture review did
d not reveaal any
vulnerability
v requires seelection of earthquake paper that deals with the performancees of
ground
g motioons (load) foor the region of interest. synthettic ground mo otion relativee to that of naatural
Fragility curvves develope ed using natural ground groundd motion. Hence, the focus of the preesent
motions of th he selected site are typicaally accepted paper is to underrstand the effect e of grround
as more realiistic. Howeveer, in the abseence of such motionn on seismic fragility curvve of RC building.
natural ground motions, many previious studies Two suites of ground motions arre selected fo or this
have used syynthetic grou und motions.. It is found purpose: (a) recorrded natural ground mo otions
that
t majorityy of investigattions in the past (Bhosale from In
ndian sites and (b) synthetic ground mo otions
et al., 2017; Ellingwood
E ett al., 2007; Raamamoorthy (adopteed from other sites and co onverted to match
m
et al., 2006) have used syynthetic grou und motions the dessign spectrumm of Indian Standard).
S Fraagility
for
f the deveelopment of fragility currves due to curves for typical RC moment re esisting frame are
unavailabilityy of the sufficient numbeer of natural developped as per th he SAC‐FEMA A method (Co ornell
 39thIABSE Symposium – Engineering the Future
September 21‐23 2017, Vancouver, Canada
et al., 2002) using the above two suites of ground
motions.
2 Methodology
A fragility function represents the probability of
exceedance of the seismic demand for a selected
performance level under a specific ground motion
intensity measure. Ground motion intensity
measure is characterized here by the measure of
peak ground acceleration (PGA). Fragility Curve
presents a cumulative probability distribution
which indicates the probability that a building will
be damaged to a given damage state or a more
severe one, as a function of intensity measure
(PGA).
Maximum inter‐storey drift (ISD) in a building
subjected to a ground motion is considered as
demand parameter in the present study. A series
of nonlinear time history analyses are carried out
to obtain the probabilistic representation of
demand parameter. An analytical approximation
of this representation is considered as per Cornell
et al. (2002) that says given the level of PGA, the
predicted median drift demand ( D̂ ) can be
represented approximately by the form:
D̂ = a (PGA )b (1)
where ‘a’ and ‘b’ are the constant coefficients.
This equation describes the probabilistic seismic
demand model (PSDM) of the given building. The
drift demands (D) are assumed to be distributed
log‐normally about the median, D̂ (Shome and
Cornell, 1999) with a standard deviation, β D PGA
(the dispersion of D considering the natural
logarithm at a given PGA level). The three
parameters, a, b and β D PGA are obtained by
performing a number of nonlinear analyses and
then conducting a regression analysis of ln (D) on
ln (PGA). The performance levels for RC moment
resisting frame in terms of ISD suggested by
ASCE/SEI 41‐06 (2007) is selected for plotting the
fragility curves as shown in Table 1.
2
Table 1. Selected performance levels
Performance levels Median ISD (%)
Light repairable damage 1
Near collapse 4
3 Ground Motion Records
India has experienced several major earthquakes
in last few decades. However, the number of
available earthquake records in Indian region is
very limited. Only 13 pairs of far field ground
motion records of past earthquakes in Indian
region are available in Center for Engineering
Strong Motion Database
(http://strongmotioncenter.org/). These ground
motion records (Table 2) are selected for the
present study as natural earthquake suit. Pseudo‐
acceleration response spectra of these natural
ground motion records are shown in Fig. 1 along
with the design spectrum of IS 1893 (2002) at 5%
damping ratio.
Thirteen pairs of far field natural ground motion
records (Table 3) are collected from Haselton et al.
(2012) and converted them to match the design
spectrum of IS 1893 (2002) using a wavelet‐based
computer program WavGen, developed by
Mukherjee and Gupta (2002). This program
decomposes a recorded accelerogram into a finite
number of time histories with energy in non‐
overlapping frequency bands and scales these
time histories up/down iteratively such that the
assembled time‐history is compatible with a
specified design spectrum. These modified
spectrum consistent ground motion records
represent the suite of synthetic ground motions in
the present study. Selection of these 13 pairs is
based on similarity of different conditions: (a)
magnitude > 6.5 in Richter scale, (b) distance from
source to site > 10 km, (c) peak ground
acceleration > 0.2g, (d) peak ground velocity > 15
cm/sec, (e) shear wave velocity in upper 30m of
soil > 180 m/s and (f) lowest useable frequency <
0.25 Hz. Fig. 2 shows the pseudo‐acceleration
response spectrums of all these converted ground
motions records at 5% damping ratio.
39thIABSE Symposium – Engineering the Future
September 21‐23 2017, Vancouver, Canada

Table 2. Selected Indian ground motions events

PGA (g) Epicentral
No Event Magnitude
Dir. 1 Dir. 2 distance (km)

1 Chamoli (1999) 4.6 0.10 0.11 24.6

2 Chamoli (1999) 6.6 0.16 0.22 123.7

3 Chamba (1995) 4.9 0.24 0.29 37.5

4 Burma Border (1995) 6.4 0.30 0.42 261.9

5 Burma Border (1987) 5.9 0.46 0.39 155

6 Burma Border (1990) 6.1 0.55 0.6 233.5

7 Bangladesh Border (1988) 5.8 0.64 0.78 117.5

8 Xizang Border (1996) 4.8 0.76 0.37 49.9

9 North East (1986) 4.5 0.88 0.87 50.9

10 Burma Border (1988) 7.2 0.96 0.9 206.5

11 Bhuj (2001) 7.0 1.03 0.9 239

12 Uttarkashi (1991) 7.0 1.15 1.16 39.3

13 Burma Border (1997) 5.6 1.48 0.93 65.4

4
Sa/g

0
0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4
Time period, s

Figure 1. Response spectra of selected natural ground motions at 5% damping ratio

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39thIABSE Symposium – Engineering the Future
September 21‐23 2017, Vancouver, Canada

Table 3. Selected far‐field ground motion records obtained from Haselton et al. (2012)
PGA (g) Epicentral
No Event Magnitude
Dir. 1 Dir. 2 distance (km)

1 Northridge (1994) 6.7 0.42 0.52 13.3

2 Northridge (1994) 6.7 0.41 0.48 26.5

3 Duzce, Turkey (1999) 7.1 0.73 0.82 41.3

4 Hector Mine (1999) 7.1 0.27 0.34 26.5

5 Imperial Valley (1979) 6.5 0.24 0.35 33.7

6 Imperial Valley (1979) 6.5 0.36 0.38 29.4

7 Kobe, Japan (1995) 6.9 0.51 0.5 8.7

8 Kobe, Japan (1995) 6.9 0.24 0.21 46

9 Kocaeli, Turkey (1999) 7.5 0.31 0.36 98.2

10 Kocaeli, Turkey (1999) 7.5 0.22 0.15 53.7

11 Landers (1992) 7.3 0.24 0.15 86

12 Landers (1992) 7.3 0.28 0.42 82.1

13 Loma Prieta (1989) 6.9 0.53 0.44 9.8

3.5

3.0

2.5

2.0
Sa/g

1.5

1.0

0.5

0.0
0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4
Time period , s

Figure 2. Response spectra of selected synthetic ground motions at 5% damping ratio

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 39thIABSE Symposium – Engineering the Future
September 21‐23 2017, Vancouver, Canada

random variables are obtained from published

4 Structural Modelling literature and presented in Table 4.
Selected building frame has four storeys with Table 4. Details of random variables
uniform storey height of 3.2 m and two bays with
a uniform bay width of 5 m. The storey masses are Variable COV
Mean Source
calculated considering the dead loads and Parameters (%)
appropriate portion of imposed load as per IS Concrete comp. 30.28 Ranganathan
1893 (2002). The building frame is designed as per 21
strength MPa (1999)
IS 456 (2000) and detailed as per IS 13920 (1993) Yield strength of 468.90 Ranganathan
10
for the seismic loading requirement of IS 1893 steel MPa (1999)
(2002) corresponding to the highest seismic zone Davenport
Global damping
of India. The characteristic strength of concrete 5% 40 and Carroll
ratio
and reinforcement steel are taken as 25 MPa and (1986)
415 MPa respectively. The design details of the OpenSEES tool developed by McKenna et al.
building frame are presented in Fig. 3. (2014) is used for nonlinear time history analysis
performed in this study. Details of the structural
2 bays @ 5 m
modelling approach and its validation are
available in Bhosale et al. (2017).
B3 C2
Beam
4 Storeys 5 Fragility Curves
B2 C2 Column
@ 3.2 m 350 A set of 26 random values is generated as per
8Y20
B1 C2 Latin hypercube sampling technique using the
350 parameters given in Table 4. These values are
B1 C1 used randomly to create 26 different
computational models for the selected frame. The
(a) Selected frame (b) Column C1 26 selected ground motions in each of the two
300 5Y20 categories are scaled linearly from 0.1g to 1.0g,
350 and each of the 26 computational models is
8Y18 analyzed for an earthquake (randomly selected)
375 4Y20 with a particular PGA. A total of 26 nonlinear time
350
history analyses are performed for each of two
categories, and the maximum ISD for the frame is
(c) Column C2 (d) Beam B1 obtained.
4Y20 4Y20 The maximum ISDs and the corresponding PGAs
300
300 are plotted in a logarithmic graph as shown in Fig.
4 for both of the two ground motion categories.
375 3Y20 3Y20 Each point in the plot represents the PGA values
325
and the corresponding maximum ISD. A power law
relationship (refer Eq. 1) for the selected frame is
(e) Beam B2 (f) Beam B3 fitted using regression analysis, which represents
the PSDM.
Figure 3. Selected RC frame configurations and
The regression coefficients, ‘a’ and ‘b’, are found
section details (dimensions are in mm) out for both of the two categories and reported in
Table 5. The PSDM provides the most likely value
Uncertainties associated with concrete of maximum ISD of the frame in the event of an
compressive strength, yield strength of reinforcing earthquake of individual PGA (up to 1g). The
steel and global damping ratio are considered in vulnerability of the structure can be identified
the probabilistic seismic analysis. Details of these through the PSDM. Fig. 4 compares the PSDMs

5
 39thIABSE Symposium – Engineering the Future
September 21‐23 2017, Vancouver, Canada

obtained from the two selected categories of
earthquakes. It can be observed from Fig. 4 that
the ISD given by PSDMs generated by synthetic
ground motions is consistently higher than that of
natural ground motions for the entire PGA range.
Natural
Synthetic
for both these categories for selected
performance limit states and presented in Fig. 5.
The exceedance probabilities for selected frame
using synthetic ground motions are found to be
consistently higher than that of natural ground
motions for the entire range of PGA.
1

Probability of Exceedance
10 0.8

0.6
ISD,%

1
0.4

0.1 0.2 Natural

Synthetic
0
0.01 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
0.1 1 PGA, g
PGA, g
(a) at light repairable damage
Figure 4. PSDMs obtained from two categories of
1
ground motion records
Probability of Exceedance

0.8 Natural
Another important observation can be noted here
that the dispersions in the drift demand (βd|PGA) Synthetic
considerably lower for synthetic ground motions 0.6
when compared with natural ground motions.
Uncertainty in the ground motion is lost to a great 0.4
extent during the conversion of synthetic
earthquake to a spectrum consistent one. Figs. 1‐2 0.2
clearly indicate that uncertainty is compromised in
the spectrum consistent synthetic ground motion.
0
The conservative results of synthetic ground
motions can be attributed to larger constant 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
PGA, g
acceleration plateau of synthetic ground motions
compared to natural ground motion records. (b) near collapse
Table 5. PSDMs and dispersions for two suites of Figure 5: Fragility curves for the selected frame
ground motion records
6 Conclusions
Ground Motion PSDM R2 βD|PGA
PSDMs and Fragility curves are developed for a
Natural 1.52(PGA) 1.326
0.61 0.80 typical code designed RC building frame using two
categories of ground motion records: natural
Synthetic 4.31 (PGA)1.249 0.82 0.38 ground motions and spectrum consistent
synthetic ground motions. Natural ground
To study the performance of selected frames
motions are selected from past earthquake
under the two selected categories of earthquake
records in Indian region, and synthetic ground
ground motion, the fragility curves are developed

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 39thIABSE Symposium – Engineering the Future
September 21‐23 2017, Vancouver, Canada
motions are generated matching design spectrum
of Indian Standard. Two important observations
are made from this study: (a) uncertainty
associated with earthquake load is found to be
lost to a great extent spectrum consistent
synthetic ground motions are developed and (b)
PSDM and fragility curve developed using
spectrum consistent synthetic ground motions is
found to be conservative.
7 References
[1] ASCE/SEI 41‐06 (2007) Seismic
Rehabilitation of Existing Buildings,
American Society of Civil Engineers, USA
[2] Bhosale, A, Davis, R, and Sarkar, P (2017)
“Vertical Irregularity of Buildings: Regularity
Index versus Seismic Risk,” ASCE‐ASME
Journal of Risk and Uncertainty in
Engineering Systems Part A: Civil
Engineering, DOI:
10.1061/AJRUA6.0000900, 2017
[3] Cornell, CA, Jalayer, F, Hamburger, RO and
Foutch, DA (2002) “The probabilistic basis
for the 2000 SAC/FEMA steel moment
frame guidelines”, Journal of Structural
Engineering, 128(4):526‐533
[4] Davenport, AG and Carroll, H (1986)
“Damping in tall buildings: its variability and
treatment in design”, ASCE Spring
Convention, Seattle, USA, Building Motion in
wind, 42‐57
[5] Ellingwood, BR, Celik, OC and Kinali, K
(2007) “Fragility assessment of building
structural systems in Mid‐America”,
Earthquake Engineering and Structural
Dynamics, 36:1935–1952
[6] Haselton, CB, Whittaker AS, Hortacsu, A,
Baker, JW, Bray, J and Grant, DN (2012)
“Selecting and scaling earthquake ground
motions for performing response‐history
analyses”, Proceedings of the 15th World
Conference on Earthquake Engineering,
Lisboa, Portugal
[7] IS 456 (2000) Indian standard for plain and
reinforced concrete code of practice, Bureau
of Indian Standards, New Delhi
[8] IS 1893 Part I (2002) Indian standard criteria
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structures, Bureau of Indian Standards, New
Delhi
[9] IS 13920 (1993) Ductile detailing of
reinforced concrete structures subjected to
seismic forces ‐ code of practice, Bureau of
Indian Standards, New Delhi
[10] McKenna, F, McGann, C, Arduino, P and
Harmon, JA (2014) OpenSees Laboratory,
https://nees.org/resources/openseeslab
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“Wavelet‐based generation of spectrum
compatible time histories”, Soil dynamics
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[12] Rajeev, P and Tesfamariam, S (2012)
“Seismic fragilities for reinforced concrete
buildings with consideration of
irregularities”, Structural Safety, 39:1‐3
[13] Ramamoorthy, S, Gardoni, P, and Bracci, J
(2006) “Probabilistic Demand Models and
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132(10), 1563–1572
[14] Ranganathan, R (1999) Structural reliability
analysis and design, Jaico Publishing House,
Mumbai
[15] Shome, N, and Cornell, CA (1999)
“Probabilistic Seismic Demand Analysis of
Nonlinear Structures,” Rep. No. RMS‐35,
Dept. of Civil and Environmental
Engineering, Stanford Univ., Stanford,
California
[16] Wu, D, Tesfamariam, S, Stiemer, SF and Qin,
D (2012) “Seismic fragility assessment of RC
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buildings”, Earthquake Engineering and
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[17] Centre for Engineering Strong Motion Data,
http://strongmotioncenter.org/ (Apr. 18,
2017)