EAPSI: Evaluating the Seismic Performance of a New Building 'spine' Technology

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Many contemporary buildings tend to form a soft story mechanism during an earthquake. This behavior is characterized by large demands concentrated in a single story of the building. These demands can ultimately limit the capacity of the entire system and increase both structural and nonstructural damage, leading to structural collapse. This award supports research to develop the merits of a relatively new 'spine' system. The new system utilizes a spine that ties all the stories in a building together, forcing them to behave as one unit so that damage is not permitted to concentrate in a single story. If effective, this system could become essential for suitable structural performance during seismic events. This project will be conducted at National Taiwan University in Taipei, Taiwan under the mentorship of Professor K.C. Tsai, a noted expert on innovative steel building systems.This study will attempt to quantify the relationship between the use of a spine and its ability to mitigate a soft story. There has been little research internationally addressing the specific details of the spine concept and how to implement a spine into design practice. The purpose of this study would be to address the following questions about a spine system: (1) What is the effect of allowing yielding in the mast rather than designing it to be completely elastic? (2) What is the effect on the system if the inelastic portion outside of the mast is significantly damaged and exhibits substantial deterioration during a seismic event? (3) What is the resiliency of the system in terms of the amount of residual drift associated with a mast system after an event? Special emphasis will be placed on the first of these questions. This NSF EAPSI award supports the research of a U.S. graduate student and is funded in collaboration with the Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan.