The influence of seismic intensity parameters on structural damage of RC buildings using principal components analysis

Seismic intensity parameters that represent the damage potential of an earthquake should be identified after the event. Extracting ground motion parameters helps track structural damage and/or failure, which makes determining the parameters of the dynamic behavior of structures of utmost importance. This investigation was conducted on four reinforced concrete frames with short to medium range periods using a set of 85 earthquake ground motions. The considered structural damage criteria were inter-story drift, roof drift, and the Park-Ang damage index. Structure response was estimated by eliminating any correlation between ground motion parameters using principal components analysis and different combinations of these parameters. The influence of ground motion parameters on structural damage, using regression coefficients, was also investigated. The results indicate that frequency-dependent parameters better predict damage criteria in comparison to time-dependent parameters.