Challenges for the Next Generation of Seismic Codes - Earthquake Engineering for Structural Design - page 519

Figure 10.39 Influence of pulse number until fracture
(Gioncu and Mazzolani, 2002)
10.8 RECOMMENDATIONS FOR DEVELOPING SIMPLE BUT
RELIABLE NEW CODE PROVISIONS
10.8.1 Two Topics for New Codes
Earthquakes produced in urban areas have demonstrated that the economic impact
of damage, loss of function and business interruption is huge and that the damage
control must become a more explicit design consideration (Fajfer and Krawinkler,
1997). The recent earthquakes have demonstrated that the behavior of structures
depends on the earthquake type (Gioncu and Mazzolani, 2006). Therefore, the new
codes, in order to improve the seismic design, must consider the following two
topics:
- Performance-based design.
- Specific design and performance evaluation approaches for structures in
function of the earthquake type.
As presented in Section 10.1.2, the implementation of these topics in codes is
constrained by the need to be simple, but reliable, to be assimilated and not
rejected, by the engineering community, which is generally conservative. For this
reason, it must preserve the existing format of the present codes, the new aspects
representing only some diversification of the principal design data.