Fragility Methodology for Performance-Based Engineering of Wood-Frame Residential Construction

Abstract

Hurricanes and earthquakes have caused extensive property damage to wood-frame residential construction in the past two decades in the United States. In order to improve residential building performance and mitigate losses from hurricane and earthquake hazards, there is an urgent need for better understanding of building performance and improvements in design and evaluation tools.

In this study, a fragility analysis methodology is developed for assessing the response of light-frame wood construction exposed to extreme hurricane winds and earthquakes. The fragility is a conditional limit state probability, presented as a function of the 3-second gust wind speed (hurricanes) or spectral acceleration at the fundamental period of the building (earthquakes), leading to a relation between damage state probability and the hazard stipulated in ASCE Standard 7. A fully coupled probabilistic framework is proposed to assess reliability of the residential construction through convolution of the structural fragility model with hazard models. Finally, a comparative risk assessment addresses the similarities and differences in competing hurricane and earthquake hazards.

The tools above can be used to evaluate new and existing building products, model the uncertainties that are inherent to the prediction of building performance, and manage the risk that is consequent to these uncertainties economically