Performance-based seismic evaluation of 1906 masonry buildings with incremental dynamic analysis

This paper presents the results of a performance-based seismic evaluation of a 6-storey typical industrial masonry building built in 1906 in Montreal, Canada. The Applied Element Method that combines the advantages of Finite Element Method with that of the Discrete Element Method in terms of accurately modeling a deformable continuum of discrete materials is used to conduct a thorough 4-step performance-based seismic evaluation. To this end, the Incremental Dynamic Analysis of the masonry building is carried out using 14 sets of synthetic and real ground motions representing three M and R categories. >From the IDA curves, the intensity and damage measure values are calculated at three structural performance levels —immediate occupancy, life safety, and collapse prevention. The building’s fragility curves at each structural performance level are then developped and used to obtain the mean annual frequencies of exceeding those performance levels.