Caveats for Performance Based Seismic Design
30.11.2017

Atılım Üniversitesi, İnşaat Mühendisliği Bölümü tarafından organize edilen “Caveats for Performance Based Seismic Design" adlı seminer 29 Kasım Çarşamba günü Mühendislik Fakültesi Kemal Zaim konferans salonunda gerçekleşti.  Seminer, Sayın Prof. Dr. Polat Gülkan tarafından verildi. 

Aşağıda seminer sunumuna ait özet yazı yer almaktadır:

Abstract:

Much intellectual capital has been invested in the pursuit of crafting increasingly more refined procedures that collectively comprise the performance based design and assessment methodology. Engineers who are educated at the public’s expense operate somewhere between banking and physics in their service to the public, and yet it is usually the banking that wins. If PBD is to turn the table in favor of the engineers, then its bag must be able to exhibit convincing cases that it performs well itself. Field confirmation is a pre-requisite for unconditional adoption. To our knowledge, no major building that has been explicitly designed according to PB anywhere in the world has ever experienced a strong-enough earthquake that would confirm the validity of the design path. Post-de-facto assessment exercises for existing buildings are inconclusive at best.

Every theory must pass the test provided by nature serving engineering as a reliable instrument. Earthquakes are seldom events, and there is as yet little empirical evidence for existing RC building performance well in the nonlinear range except under infrequently occurring conditions or in the lab. Building stock elements are less perfectly known, so there is more uncertainty in modeling them. This presentation proposes in humorous fashion to answer the rhetorical question of “do we have the tools for forecasting building performance under actual earthquakes of real buildings, given their blueprints and their input motion?”

Polat Gülkan

Professor Emeritus of Civil Engineering, METU, Ankara 06890