Sharif Digital Repository

Continuous improvement of the existing seismic design codes and regulations clearly shows the need for evaluation and probable retrofitting of the existing building structures. A large amount of literature has been produced on different topics related to retrofitting including FEMA 273, ATC 40, FEMA356 and most recently the draft of FEMA 440. On the other hand, it has been long recognized that the response of buildings to strong ground shaking caused by earthquakes results in inelastic behavior. Until recently, most structural analysis techniques devised for practical application relied on linear procedures to predict the seismic response of the building structures. But due to various... 

On the average, ten thousand people die annually due to earthquakes. A UNESCO study gives damage losses amounting to ten billion dollars within the years 1926 to 1950 from earthquakes. These data shows the importance of earthquake issue that causes the scientists to pay special attention to this subject. In despite of significant improvements in many of scientific fields, earthquake is still remains as an unknown event without the possibility of predicting its time and location of occurrence. Because of that, a large effort has been paid for rehabilitation of structures to prevent the human loss and maintaining the necessary life safety. In this regard, various guidelines have been proposed... 

The necessity of providing synthetic acceleration records suitable for seismic assessment of the structures in the regions whose seismological history has not enough instrumental recordings has become one of the main concerns of the earthquake engineers. Despite being accurate in estimating earthquake ground motion, physics-based methods involve complicated procedures and need the detailed information about source, path and the site conditions of the scenario event which is not available for lots of engineering problems. The main goal of this dissertation is to introduce a novel stochastic method for the simulation of the non-stationary earthquake acceleration records compatible enough with...