9812531 Chopra It has been recognized by the profession the need for designing structures to meet stated performance goals. A major challenge is to develop simple, yet effective analytical methods for the design, verification, evaluation and quality control of structures so that they realistically meet the selected performance objectives. The overall objectives of this research project are to develop dynamic analysis procedures suitable for the next generation of seismic codes and guidelines to design new buildings and to evaluate existing buildings. A hierarchy of (i) elastic analysis procedures to design or evaluate buildings for "fully operational" or "operational" performance levels, (ii) inelastic analysis procedures to design and evaluate buildings for "operational," "life safe" or "near collapse" performance levels, and (iii) criteria to evaluate the accuracy and the range of applicability of each procedure will be developed. Further, investigations will be conducted to (1) evaluate, from a fundamental point of view, applicability of the present knowledge to near-source ground motions; and (2) generalize the existing analytical procedures or, if necessary, develop fundamentally different methods for near-source excitations. This project represents a collaborative effort with Japanese researchers and Degnenkolb Engineers, (CMS-9812573). Researchers in the U.S. and Japan will use common near-source ground motions recorded in both countries an calibrate their simplified analytical procedures against common structures whose motions have been recorded during past earthquakes. This project is supported under the first round (FY'98) competition of the joint CMS-INT initiative NSF 98-36, "US-Japan Cooperative Research in Urban Earthquake Disaster Mitigation." ***
