VIBRATIONAL BUFFETING OUTCOMES IN STRUCTURES

Major vibrational events during the past decade such as those that have occurred in Northridge, Imperial Valley (May 18, 1940), California (1994), Kobe, Japan (1995), Turkey (1999), Taiwan (1999) and Bhuj, Central Western India (2001) have continued to demonstrate the destructive power of earthquakes, with destruction of engineered structures, bridges, industrial and port facilities as well as giving rise to great economic losses. Among the possible structural damages, vibrational induced buffeting has been commonly observed in several earthquakes. As a result, a parametric study on structures buffeting response as well as proper vibrational hazard mitigation practice for adjacent structures is carried out. Therefore, the needs to improve vibrational performance of the built environment through the development of performance-oriented procedures have been developed. To estimate the vibrational demands, nonlinearities in the structure are to be considered when the structure enters into inelastic range during devastating earthquakes. Despite the increase in the accuracy and efficiency of the computational tools related to dynamic inelastic analysis, engineers tend to adopt simplified non-linear static procedures instead of rigorous non-linear dynamic analysis when evaluating vibrational demands. This is due to the problems related to its complexities and suitability for practical design applications. The push over analysis is a static, nonlinear procedure that can be used to estimate the dynamic needs imposed on a structure by earthquake ground motions. This project entitled