Earthquake performance evaluation

Earthquake performance evaluation of structures at earthquake exposure is a basic issue of earthquake engineering and seismic performance analysis [http://www.ecs.csun.edu/~shustov/Hot_Topics.htm] . Engineers need to know the quantified level of an actual or anticipated seismic performance associated with the direct damage to an individual building subject to a specified ground shaking.

The best way to do it is to put the structure on a shake-table that simulates the seismic loading and watch what may happen next (if you have no time to stand out in the field and wait for a real earthquake to strike, of course). s can be animated. evaluation parameters in a performance evaluation procedure are, usually, the following:

* "Ground Acceleration Mitigation Factor", when only some maximum accelerations on a structure are available [http://www.ecs.csun.edu/~shustov/Topic2.htm] ;

* "Story Performance Rating", when the story drifts are also known [http://www.ecs.csun.edu/~shustov/Topic7.htm] .

The parameter called "Seismic Performance Ratio" is chosen as the primary parameter which would control anticipated losses due to a particular seismic exposure of the building under consideration.

NEEScentral portal hosts valuable data on experimental validation of EPET, including some movie clips on the comparative shake-table testing of 6- and 12-story building models [https://central.nees.org/data/get/NEES-2006-0283/Public/5th%20NEES%20Meeting%20Presentation.ppt] . EPET can use both real time-histories and earthquake simulations and predict seismic performance of a building up to the point of its virtual state of “severe damage” [http://www.epet.space3d.biz/] .

Sometimes, earthquake performance evaluation may be a fun too; see, e.g., [http://tw.youtube.com/watch?v=UcgRtZKRip0] .