Study on the Fragility of Building Structures in Taiwan

This paper describes procedures of damage assessment for building structures in Taiwan Earthquake Loss Estimation System (TELES), and focuses on evaluation of parameters used in the building damage assessment. The objective of this paper is to define the building classification and provide the fragility functions of the general building structures in Taiwan by using the available data. The organization of this paper is as follows. First, the types of the building structures in Taiwan are reviewed and a classification based on the available data to be implemented in TELES is proposed. Second, the description of failure mechanisms and criteria in different damage states adopted in this research are summarized. Third, the theoretical methodology of the fragility analysis for the proposed building classes and examples for some typical building structures are presented. Parameters for describing the fragility functions for each class are also generated and shown in the paper. Copyright Springer 2006