Investigation of earthquake damage cost of reinforced concrete buildıngs by using performance based design methods

Design objectives in earthquake engineering has altered in recent years. Loss estimation of future earthquakes is of boosting importance since governments faces enormous financial burden to compensate for the damage incurred, especially in countries periodically affected by earthquakes. In order to deal with this, performance improvement of buildings is indispensable which already has been named as performance based design but is still not being used widely. In this concept, performance level of the building is described in terms of damage severity. However; as it is not a design parameter, damage cost corresponding to the performance level is not calculated in any stage of this method. This paper mainly focuses on the earthquake induced damage cost of the building associated with the probability of structural response being in different limit states due to moderate to strong seismic events. The cost here includes diverse loss components such as economic, casualties, loss of function etc. In order to obtain this cost, an example mid-rise building residing in İzmir, which frequently undergoes different levels of earthquakes, has been selected. Although there are different approaches to associate earthquake induced cost with different damage levels buildings are exposed to, in this paper inter-story drift has been used as an effective response. Those structural analysis methods are response spectrum, time history and push-over analyses methods. Comparison of the results associated with inter-story drifts indicates that these methods provide a good estimation of earthquake induced damage cost. To sum up, the main objective of this thesis is improving building's performance by considering the earthquake induced cost. Besides; various structural analysis methods have beensuggested to obtain final results. Hence, one can opt for the simpler method rather than cumbersome tasks. Advantages and disadvantages of those methods have been discussed in detail as a part of concluding remarks. Moreover, the contrubition of each eartquake intensity level to earthquake induced damage cost has been disscussed.