AN APPROACH TO THE MEASUREMENT OF THE POTENTIAL STRUCTURAL DAMAGE OF EARTHQUAKE GROUND MOTIONS

The quantification and prediction of damage due to different seismic a ctions to structure types of different strength is an important proble m not yet solved in the Earthquake Engineering field. In addition, owi ng to the fact that macroseismic information cannot be used directly i n dynamic calculations, a new problem appears when these are the only kind of data available. Thus, there is a need to estimate a parameter to relate the energy of the ground motion and the damage occurrence, a nd eventually achieve a better seismic risk assessment. After the stud y and review of some representative potential damage parameters, atten tion has been paid to the Arias intensity (unfiltered and filtered in certain frequency ranges) and the Cumulative Absolute velocity (CAV) a s the parameters to evaluate the energy of movement, and to relate the m with the observed damage, The data used to infer these correlations have been provided by the ENEA-ENEL (Italy), The information consists of strong motion records from the Campano Lucano (1980), Umbria (1984) and Lazio-Abruzzo (1984) earthquakes, and data of damage to buildings in the vicinity of recording instruments (within a maximum radius of 300 m, where the soil conditions remain constant). In this paper, some relations have been obtained to quantify the damage level for differe nt seismic inputs, The results suggest that unfiltered Arias intensity and CAV (for calculation threshold 20 cm/s(2)) correlate well with th e macroseismic information used. Best fits are obtained between the qu oted parameters and the observed damage in type A structures.