EC8-based earthquake record selection procedure evaluation: Validation study based on observed damage of an irregular R/C building

This study investigates the applicability and limitations of the Eurocode 8 earthquake ground motion selection framework for the assessment of both elastic and inelastic structural response of multi-storey, irregular R/C buildings subjected to bi-directional loading. In order to minimize modelling uncertainties inherent in the quantification of structural damage and the consideration of the supporting soil–foundation system for complex structural systems, an existing building damaged by the 2003 Lefkada earthquake was adopted as case study. This selection has an advantage in that ground excitation, soil profile and damage observations are all available, thus permitting calibration of the finite element model with the observed response, especially in terms of use of appropriate plasticity models and damage indices, plus the assessment of soil–structure interaction effects. After establishing a reliable finite element model of the structure under study, extensive parametric analyses for different EC8 compliant sets of records were conducted, permitting quantification of the discrepancy of the structural response due to record-to-record and set-to-set variability (i.e., intra-set and inter-set scatter, respectively). The results confirm that many of the observations found in the literature regarding the effect of ground motion selection on the predicted seismic performance of SDOF systems are also valid for bi-directionally excited, multi-storey, irregular buildings. Finally, the results also highlight specific limitations of the EC8 provisions that may lead to erroneous results in many practical cases.