PEER Reports

A comprehensive study to evaluate the seismic performance of reinforced concrete (RC) buildings including unreinforced masonry (URM) infill walls is performed in three sequential parts: (1) shake-table experiments, (2) computational modeling, and (3) reliability-based performance evaluation. A hypothetical prototype building with RC frames, RC floor slabs, and URM infill walls is considered. A reduced-scale test structure was constructed to represent a substructure of the prototype building and subjected to a sequence of ground motions. The shake-table experiments and the global and local...

The Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center is leading an initiative to develop guidelines for new high-rise construction that will meet intended safety and performance objectives following future earthquakes, particularly when alternative means of design are employed. An initial task of this initiative was to investigate the issues associated with identifying seismic performance equivalent to that achieved by code and whether a higher seismic performance should be targeted for these buildings. Many stakeholders were interviewed for this purpose, and a workshop was convened to...

The Guidelines for Nonlinear Analysis of Bridge Structures in California presents a collection of practical and readily implementable recommendations for the modeling and analysis of highway bridges and overpasses subjected to earthquake ground motions. The specifications are applicable for Ordinary Standard Bridges in California as defined according to Caltrans Seismic Design Criteria (SDC) 2004. The main emphasis of the document is the implementation of nonlinear analysis procedures intended primarily to estimate seismic demand on critical bridge components and systems. These...

Liquefaction-induced lateral ground displacement has caused significant damage to pile foundations during past earthquakes. Ground displacements due to liquefaction can impose large forces on the overlying structure and large bending moments in the laterally displaced piles. Pile foundations, however, can be designed to withstand the displacement and forces induced by lateral ground displacement. Piles may actually “pin” the upper layer of soil that would normally spread atop the liquefied layer be low it into the stronger soils be low the liquefiable soil layer. This phenomenon is known...