Long-period building response to earthquakes in the San Francisco Bay Area

Abstract This article reports a study of modeled, long-period building responses to ground-motion simulations of earthquakes in the San Francisco Bay Area. The earth-quakes include the 1989 magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake, a magnitude 7.8 si-mulation of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and two hypothetical magnitude 7.8 northern San Andreas fault earthquakes with hypocenters north and south of San Fran-cisco. We use the simulated ground motions to excite nonlinear models of 20-story, steel, welded moment-resisting frame (MRF) buildings. We consider MRF buildings designed with two different strengths and modeled with either ductile or brittle welds. Using peak interstory drift ratio (IDR) as a performance measure, the stiffer, higher strength building models outperform the equivalent more flexible, lower strength de-signs. The hypothetical magnitude 7.8 earthquake with hypocenter north of San Fran-cisco produces the most severe ground motions. In this simulation, the responses of the more flexible, lower strength building model with brittle welds exceed an IDR of 2.5 % (that is, threaten life safety) on 54 % of the urban area, compared to 4.6 % of the urban area for the stiffer, higher strength building with ductile welds. We also use the simulated ground motions to predict the maximum isolator displacement of base-iso-lated buildings with linear, single-degree-of-freedom (SDOF) models. For two existing 3-sec isolator systems near San Francisco, the design maximum displacement is 0.5 m, and our simulations predict isolator displacements for this type of system in excess of 0.5 m in many urban areas. This article demonstrates that a large, 1906-like earthquake could cause significant damage to long-period buildings in the San Francisco Bay Area