Midbroken reinforced concrete shear frames due to earthquakes. A hysteretic model to quantify damage at the storey level

Abstract

A nonlinear hysteretic model for the response and local damage analyses of reinforced concrete shear frames subject to earthquake excitation is proposed, and, the model is applied to analyse midbroken reinforced concrete (RC) structures due to earthquake loads. Each storey of the shear frame is represented by a Clough and Johnston hysteretic oscillator with degrading elastic fraction of the restoring force. The local damage is numerically quantified in the domain [0,1] using the maximum softening damage indicators which are defined in closed form based on the variation of the eigenfrequency of the local oscillators due to the local stiffness and strength deterioration. The proposed method of response and damage analyses is illustrated using a sample 5 storey shear frame with a weak third storey in stiffness and/or strength subject to sinusoidal and simulated earthquake excitations for which the horizontal component of the ground motion is modeled as a stationary Gaussian stochastic process with Kanai-Tajimi spectrum, multiplied by an envelope function.