Sensitivity of the Cyclic Response Of Substandard Beam-column Joints To Material Properties

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 propertyon 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) isused for probabilistic numerical simulations. The material propertiesdefined as random variablesare generated by Latin Hypercube Sampling (LHS). The existing correlation among the material parameters is also considered by the simulated annealing approach ingenerating the randomsamples. A set of load-displacement curves is obtained bythe numerical simulations with the randomized material parameters. Theinvestigated outcomes (i.e., responsevariables)are the joint shear strength at the first cracking, the joint peak strength, andjoint strength and crack width at serviceability limit state, which is considered as a repairability threshold value. The basic statistics of the response variablestogether with the probability distribution functions(PDF) are calculated at differentdrift levels. The partial correlation coefficient between mate-rial parameters and response variables is alsoevaluated to outline the parameters which mainly contributetothe joint global response.The reparabilitylevel of the joint isalsoidenti-fied stochasticallyby thecrack width distribution corresponding to the serviceability limit state.