First-passage Probability Estimation of an Earthquake Response of Seismically Isolated Containment Buildings

The awareness of a seismic hazard and risk is being increased rapidly according to the frequent occurrences of the huge earthquakes such as the 2008 Sichuan earthquake which caused about 70,000 confirmed casualties and a 20 billion U.S. dollars economic loss. Since an earthquake load contains various uncertainties naturally, the safety of a structural system under an earthquake excitation has been assessed by probabilistic approaches. In many structural applications for a probabilistic safety assessment, it is often regarded that the failure of a system will occur when the response of the structure firstly crosses the limit barrier within a specified interval of time. The determination of such a failure probability is usually called the 'first-passage problem' and has been extensively studied during the last few decades. However, especially for the structures which show a significant nonlinear dynamic behavior, an effective and accurate method for the estimation of such a failure probability is not fully established yet. In this study, we presented a new approach to evaluate the first-passage probability of an earthquake response of seismically isolated structures. The proposed method is applied to the seismic isolation system for the containment buildings of a nuclear power plant. From the numerical example, we verified that the proposed method shows accurate results with more efficient computational efforts compared to the conventional approaches