Seismic design and analysis of non-structural components : review of provisions in international codes, state-of-the-practice, and application to steel storage racking

In the last few decades, seismic engineering mainly focused on the well-being of the primary structure. With the development and application of performance-based Earthquake engineering, a need to harmonize the performance levels between structural and non-structural component becomes vital. There are now almost countless examples of earthquake aftermath where the main structure was fine or almost unimpacted but where some catastrophic non-structural components failure happened leading to life-threatening situations or even casualties. Furthermore, failure of these elements can hamper the evacuation of the occupants or the work conditions of rescue workers. Additionally, the economic value of non-structural components in a building more often than not is way over the value of the main structure, in some critical facilities, representing more than 90% of the total investment. It was proven that in some case, modifications or retrofit of non-structural component was economically beneficial in the long term. Finally, non-structural components failure can highly lower the performance level by limiting the functionality of a building which can be a critical situation with, as example, hospital following seismic events. Even with those consequences, basic research work on this subject has been sparse, and the available codes prove themselves to be insufficient, basically telling the reader to rely on past experiences or intuition. Often the basic procedure after an earthquake is to observe what went wrong and provide the minimum of modification to try to prevent repetitions. The work of this thesis will start with an introduction to the world of non-structural components, and a review of the existing standards. The second part will focus on the design and analysis of steel storage racks.