Bulletin of Earthquake Engineering, vol.15, no.7, pp.3083-3101, 2017 (SCI-Expanded)
This study investigates the feasibility of using combination of present ground motion parameters to have a hybrid parameter that is more correlated with damage. Since RC buildings constitute the prevailing type of construction in many earthquake prone countries, low and mid-rise RC buildings are targeted in an example study. Displacement demand is assumed to represent the seismic damage. Its mean value is determined for 1056 capacity curves for each of 466 acceleration records. Then an optimization study is performed to select and weight the commonly used ground motion parameters to have a high correlation with displacement demands. Hence, equations for hybrid parameters are defined. It is observed that by combining the ground motion parameters, better results up to 6–28% may be achieved depending on the relevant factors and cases. This approach may be applied to other types of structures, as well. Using this type of case specific hybrid ground motion parameter relations, significant improvements may be obtained for the evaluation and assessment of seismic damage.