LAUSR

Abstract The development of collapse fragility curves is an essential requirement for the assessment of the collapse risk of structures. These fragility curves depend on the structural collapse capacity that is evaluated in terms of either the intensity measure (IM) or the damage measure (DM); such as the engineering demand parameter (EDP). In turn, collapse capacity estimates are sensitive to the method employed for their assessment. Conventionally, the IM and DM rules are employed in conjunction with incremental dynamic analyses (IDA) to quantify the collapse capacity of a structure. However, this approach has been criticised for being subjective in nature, since it depends on the structural response approaching predetermined threshold values. Therefore, it does not relate to the actual dynamic instability. Although the selection of these thresholds stems from the results of experimental investigations and equivalent numerical models and serve as an indirect check for dynamic instability, the present study seeks to provide a mathematical basis for defining collapse criteria. A dynamical system approach is used to formulate a mathematical criterion for defining P-Delta instability induced seismic collapse in single-degree-of-freedom (SDOF) structures. The non-linear SDOF structure is considered as a non-autonomous, non-smooth system, and is studied as an ensemble of different sub-systems. Collapse is defined as the point when the dominant system eigenmode of the structure changes from stable to unstable, and remains unstable as the structure collapses. This approach can be applied to first mode governed multi-degree-of-freedom (MDOF) structures when studied as an equivalent SDOF structure. It is found that the dynamical systems approach results in higher deformations at collapse when compared to the conventional IM/DM rule based approach, suggesting the conservatism involved in the latter. However, it results in lower deformations at collapse when compared to the energy criterion, which relies on the occurrence of large deformations to predict collapse. Furthermore, the derived fragility curves show that the proposed approach yields lower probabilities of collapse when compared to the conventional method. Therefore, the proposed method can be used an alternative method for the performance design of structures.