Fragility Based Assessment of a School Building in Turkey

Abstract

This study focuses on, by means of a probabilistic approach, the seismic safety evaluation of a school building in Turkey designed before the introduction of modern anti-seismic codes. A typical school building which was designed according to the 1975 version of the Turkish Earthquake Code is selected for the performance assessment. Inelastic pushover and time history analyses are deployed under the effect of one hundred input ground motions. Fragility curves are generated for different concrete and detailing quality in terms of peak ground velocity. The probabilistic seismic response and vulnerability of the school are investigated by building fragility curves of the system and of its most vulnerable components. The results illustrate the significance of assessing the vulnerability of typical school buildings under the effect of various seismic scenarios and the need for extending this study to cover other typical classes of school buildings in the region.