Lachanas C.G., Vamvatsikos D., Kazantzi A.K. (2023). Intensity measures for assessing the rocking response of server racks in steel buildings. Proceedings of the 10th Hellenic National Conference on Steel Structures, Athens, Greece. (in greek)
Abstract | Alternative seismic intensity measures (IMs) are examined for the case of non-structural rocking building contents and in particular for the case of server racks standing freely on the higher floors of steel buildings. Observations following recent earthquakes in developed countries have revealed that most of the damages after a seismic event consider non-structural building contents of high value. On the other hand, the selection of a robust
IM is a basic requirement in the context of the performance-based earthquake engineering framework for assessing the seismic risk and the consequential loss/damage of engineering structures or non-structural contents with high fidelity. Hence, a bunch of alternative IMs are tested in terms of efficiency and sufficiency as potential IMs for rocking vulnerability studies. The simple planar rocking block model is employed for running nonlinear dynamic analysis with a set of 34 floor motions that were recorded during past earthquakes on the roof of instrumented steel buildings. Rocking blocks of various shapes and sizes are analyzed that resemble two-dimensional analogues of server racks. After analysis, efficiency and sufficiency of the examined IMs are compared aiming to propose optimal IMs for the case of rocking contents in the different stages of rocking response from rocking uplift to overturning.
[paper]