Hazus-compatible seismic fragility analysis for rc frame structures

As a kind of multi-disaster loss assessment software, HAZUS is world-widely used. Determining the seismic fragility functions of structures is the key issue of HAZUS to conduct seismic loss assessment. However, traditional seismic fragility results cannot match the format requirement of HAZUS. In light of this, this paper presents a simplified approach to derive the HAZUS-compatible seismic fragility curves. This method directly uses the traditional seismic fragility results and transforms them to the HAZUS format through employing the capacity-diagram method to determine parameters in terms of spectral displacements for used ground motion records. To illustrate the proposed method, four RC frame structures of various heights are selected as study cases, and the results by the proposed method and those by the HAZUS-provided fragility curves are compared. Results show that the HAZUS-compatible seismic fragility results have significant difference from HAZUS-provided seismic fragility curves since they adopt different analysis methods and face to different study objectives.