Aftershock seismic assessment taking into account postmainshock residual drifts

This paper introduces and evaluates a methodology for the aftershock seismic assessment of buildings taking explicitly into account residual drift demands after the mainshock (i.e., postmainshock residual interstory drifts, RIDR_o). The methodology is applied to a testbed four‐story steel moment‐resisting building designed with modern seismic design provisions when subjected to a set of near‐fault mainshock–aftershock seismic sequences that induce five levels of RIDR_o. Once the postmainshock residual drift is induced to the building model, a postmainshock incremental dynamic analysis is performed under each aftershock to obtain its collapse capacity and its capacity associated to demolition (i.e., the capacity to reach or exceed a 2% residual drift). The effect of additional sources of stiffness and strength (i.e., interior gravity frames and slab contribution) and the polarity of the aftershocks are examined in this study. Results of this investigation show that the collapse potential under aftershocks strongly depends on the modeling approach (i.e., the aftershock collapse potential is modified when additional sources of lateral stiffness and strength are included in the analytical model). Furthermore, it is demonstrated that the aftershock capacity associated to demolition (i.e., the aftershock collapse capacity associated to a residual interstory drift that leads to an imminent demolition) is lower than that of the aftershock collapse capacity, which mean that this parameter should be a better measure of the building residual capacity against aftershocks. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.