Seismic fragility of structures with energy dissipation devices for mainshock-aftershock events

This paper presents a mainshock-aftershock seismic fragility and collapse capacity assessment of reinforced concrete (RC) structures retrofitted with a hybrid damper composed of a steel slit plate and friction pads. Three and eight-story RC buildings are designed and assessed before and after retrofit considering the aftershocks effect. Non-linear time-history response analysis (NLTHA) using twelve natural earthquake sequences are used to produce incremental dynamic analysis (IDA) curves to obtain the median collapse capacity of the structures. Three different damage state (DS) levels are used for the mainshock ground excitation to quantify the scale factors required for conducting the aftershock IDAs. The maximum interstory drift ratio (MIDR) is used as the main engineering demand parameter. The study shows the importance of considering the aftershock in the seismic assessment process of RC structures. The un-retrofitted structures are found to experience a high level of deterioration under aftershock event which is not considered in the design stage. The findings of the study reveal that the mainshock-aftershock sequence responses of the retrofitted structures show better performance in terms of the median collapse capacity and the seismic fragility compared to the un-retrofitted ones.