Tectonic hazards/Seismic performance evaluation

Seismic performance evaluation is a formal procedure to quantify the level of actual or anticipated seismic performance associated with the direct damage to an individual building subject to a specified ground shaking.



The best way to do it is to put a model that simulates the building structure on a shake-table that simulates the earth shaking and to watch what may happen next (if you have no time to stand out in the field and wait for a real earthquake to strike, which is called a field testing). Such kinds of experiments were performed still more than a century ago. Another way is to evaluate the earthquake performance analytically.

The very first earthquake simulations were performed by statically applying some horizontal inertia forces, based on scaled peak ground accelerations, to a mathematical model of a building. With the further development of computational technologies, static approaches began to give way to dynamic ones.

Traditionally, numerical simulation and physical tests have been uncoupled and performed separately. So-called hybrid testing systems employ rapid, parallel analysis using both physical and computational tests.