Alicea-Rodríguez, Ángel J.

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    Modeling, dynamic identification, and nonlinear assessment of civil structures from recorded earthquakes and ambient vibrations
    (2018-12-12) Alicea-Rodríguez, Ángel J.; López-Rodríguez, Ricardo R.; College of Engineering; Suárez-Colche, Luis E.; Martínez-Cruzado, José A.; Huerta-López, Carlos I.; Department of Civil Engineering; Vidot-Vega, Aidcer L.
    America’s infrastructure was constructed mainly during the mid-20th century. Its aging effects are increasing every year, creating a dilemma in which the United States is not alone. Moreover, the great majority of buildings and bridges are seismically non-compliant with current building codes and many have been in place far beyond their design lives. This issues acquire special relevance in countries that are located in seismically prone regions and that historically have suffered the onslaught of strong seismic events. In large urban areas the problem is particularly acute because space is scarce and growing populations stress city support systems. Puerto Rico, as many other countries and cities in the United States, is geographically located in a highly active seismic region. The island has suffered and documented the onslaught of four destructive events of 7.5M and greater. Moreover, since 2014 more than 3,000 tremors are registered per year by the Puerto Rico Seismic Network. This study aims to assess two aged structural systems which are representative of two of the main infrastructure systems in the island. A 2-span reinforced concrete highway bridge located in Ponce, PR and a high-rise reinforced concrete residential building in San Juan, PR are evaluated by implementing state-of-the-art practices on dynamic identification to recorded earthquakes and ambient vibrations. Analytical and computational models are generated for each structure and updated from time and frequency domain methods. Analytical and experimental Frequency Response Functions are generated to better understand the expected behavior of both structural systems in the linear-elastic regime when subjected to minor intensity seismic events. Furthermore, unrecorded seismic events were successfully identified by output-only recorded data and updated Frequency Response Functions. A proposed method is implemented to identify structural dynamic properties with increased fidelity where there is no input excitation recording. In addition, a simplified approach for modeling complex structural systems is presented and effectively implemented in computational nonlinear analyses. A set of seven probable earthquakes for each city are modified to meet current building code requirements and are used in nonlinear analyses of both structures as input ground motions. It was found that the bridge behaved predominantly linear-elastic with spontaneous events of minor nonlinearities. A pushover capacity curve was generated to confirm if the bridge behaved beyond its elastic range when subjected to the probable earthquakes in the nonlinear analyses. The results for the building shows that it suffered excessive permanent deformations for two of the probable earthquakes and collapsed for the other five probable earthquakes used as input ground motions.