Development of a Relation Model for Damage Categorization

Abstract

After an earthquake, many field investigations are conducted to classify the damage undergone by the buildings. In many cases, it has been found that the global damage category assigned to the construction does not correspond to the damage associated with the building various components (bearing elements, non-bearing elements, infrastructure, environment, etc.). In this paper, a method for the quantitative evaluation of post-earthquake damage of buildings is developed, based on the theory of the design of experiments. This study has been conducted by processing a database of 7.847 damaged buildings extracted from a database collected during a post-earthquake survey (Boumerdes, Algeria, 2003 earthquake). In doing so, firstly, two mathematical models have been developed to quantify the two quantities that assess the state of all the bearing and non-bearing elements (DER) and (DES) respectively. Then, a function representing the relationship between the severity of the element-scale damage and the global damage category of the building was developed. Finally, an application of the proposed method has been performed on a set of ten damaged buildings. The results indicate that the proposed method provides a more accurate assessment on the condition of the building compared to the decisions made by the engineers during the Boumerdes earthquake inspection in 2003.