Sensitivity of the Cyclic Response of Substandard Beam-Column Joints to Material Properties

Abstract

The uncertainties related to the material properties may significantly affect the seismic perfor-mance of structural components. In this study, the influence of each material property on the global response of reinforced concrete substandard beam-column joints is evaluated by means of a sensitivity analysis. An experimentally validated finite element model (FEM) is used for probabilistic numerical simulations. The material properties defined as random variables are generated by Latin Hypercube Sampling (LHS). The existing correlation among the material parameters is also considered by the simulated annealing approach in generating the random samples. A set of load-displacement curves is obtained by the numerical simulations with the randomized material parameters. The investigated outcomes (i.e., response variables) are the joint shear strength at the first cracking, the joint peak strength, and joint strength and crack width at serviceability limit state, which is considered as a repairability threshold value. The basic statistics of the response variables together with the probability distribution functions (PDF) are calculated at different drift levels. The partial correlation coefficient between mate-rial parameters and response variables is also evaluated to outline the parameters which main-ly contribute to the joint global response. The reparability level of the joint is also identified sto-chastically by the crack width distribution corresponding to the serviceability limit state.