Seismic reliability of steel-concrete composite frames

Recent earthquakes have shown that buildings designed primarily for life safety according to the seismic provisions of current building codes could sustain too severe damage to structural and non structural elements and building contents. To this end, the scientific community is developing more accurate methodologies in order to evaluate seismic performances of structures. In this framework, the present paper aims at the evaluation of the Mean Annual Frequency (MAF) of exceeding a limit state by means of the probabilistic approach, introduced by Jalayer & Cornell. Reference is made to a steel-concrete composite frame, designed according to Eurocode 8 and built in real scale at the ELSA Laboratory of Ispra. The reason for investigating this frame is related to the availability of pseudo-dynamic testing results; so that, it has been possible to evaluate its seismic reliability taking into account both randomness uncertainty and epistemic uncertainty.