Quantification of Shaking-based Criteria for Evaluating Aseismic Performance of House and Building

Based on the 22-year (1996–2018) Japan Meteorological Agency periodical data, the number of human injuries exceeded those deaths due to earthquakes. Similarly, the number of collapsed houses number and buildings is below the number of partly damaged ones. Investigations showed that the cause of human casualties was shaking when strong earthquakes occurred. The collapse of non-structural components, bookcases, machinery equipment, or ceilings as a result of severe shaking is the primary cause of human mortality. The report indicates that the houses and buildings designed by the up-to-date seismic code revisions show adequate resistance against the earthquake. However, the latest codes fail to protect the human casualties inside the houses and buildings. Present works proposed quantifying shaking-based criteria for evaluating houses and buildings’ seismic intensity scale (SIS). Using SIS could benefit the designer in selecting the appropriate aseismic methods. This SIS-based criterion is verified by evaluating a 5-story earthquake-proof frame structure equipped with two aseismic devices. The results show that the maximum acceleration reduction was 77.7% and 88.6% for a frame with a tuned mass damper (TMD) and a base isolator (BI) consecutively. The decrease in SIS number for a frame with BI is more significant compared to TMD. The study concluded that BI is more effective than TMD in reducing the shaking of houses and buildings. The objective of SIS computing is to find measures or actions that can minimize the risk of human casualties and evaluate the best performances of aseismic devices in houses and buildings during earthquakes.