Displacement controlled behaviour of soft storey buildings based on the results from full scale testing

Traditionally, performance assessment of a structure is based on trading off strength demand with ductility demand. The current guidelines recommend a very low drift capacity for soft storey buildings. Furthermore, the application of these guidelines in low and moderate seismic regions such as Australia will result in most of the soft-storey buildings being deemed unsafe when subjected to earthquake excitations. Force-displacement data obtained from experimental full-scale studies on a real four-storey soft-storey building in Melbourne has been used as input into nonlinear time-history analyses. A range of near-field and far-field earthquake scenarios of different M-R combinations have been employed for parametric studies. Fragility curves defining probability of failure of structures have been developed. In order to by-pass conventional force based analysis which is time consuming, the new approach based on displacement controlled phenomena has been used for the seismic assessment of structures in low and moderate seismic regions for the seismic assessment.