Rocking Response of Unanchored Building Contents Considering Horizontal and Vertical Excitation
Publication: Journal of Structural Engineering
Volume 146, Issue 9
Abstract
The seismic performance of unanchored slender contents at various floor levels within a building has received little attention in the literature, despite earthquake reconnaissance reports routinely emphasizing the overturning of contents as a pervasive problem. This paper investigates the rocking response of building contents in a four-story concentrically braced frame building, focusing on how the variation in horizontal and vertical floor accelerations in the building affects the planar pure rocking demands (sliding and bouncing are not considered). A cascading dynamic analysis approach is taken whereby nonlinear response history analyses of a three-dimensional (3D) building model to a suite of ground motions provides the floor accelerations, which are in turn used to develop rocking spectra for assessing demands on unanchored building contents of various sizes and aspect ratios. The effect of the vertical floor excitation on the peak rocking response is found to be negligible for most practical purposes, especially for slender components. Consequently, rocking demands on an object are not affected by where it is placed on a specific floor. Rocking demands on an object increase at higher floors because horizontal floor accelerations are amplified with elevation, but the difference in rocking demands from one floor to the next are significantly more pronounced for stocky than for slender objects. Finally, the paper develops analytical fragility curves for rocking and overturning limit states using the normalized peak rotation angle as the demand parameter and a physically motivated floor intensity measure based on the peak floor velocity, block size, and slenderness.
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Data Availability Statement
All data, models, and code generated or used during the study appear in the published article.
Acknowledgments
The majority of this work was completed while Professor Konstantinidis was a faculty member at McMaster University. Financial support for this work was provided by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
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Published In
Journal of Structural Engineering
Volume 146 • Issue 9 • September 2020
Copyright
©2020 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: May 10, 2019
Accepted: Mar 4, 2020
Published online: Jun 23, 2020
Published in print: Sep 1, 2020
Discussion open until: Nov 23, 2020
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