Analysis of Seismic Fragility of Aqueduct Structure Based on Copula Function

Establishing the joint probability distribution function directly of the basic components in the aqueduct system is hard, because of the correlation of seismic demand among components in structural vulnerability analysis. This paper proposed a new method for analyzing the vulnerability of aqueduct structure. A two-dimensional Copula function is introduced to describe the related structures of component seismic demands and simplify the modeling process of joint distribution function. The results show that the failure probability calculated based on Copula function is between the upper and lower bounds of the first-order boundary method. The results help to simplify the modeling process of the aqueduct system vulnerability curve, and at the same time, providing a new way to study the correlation between seismic demand of aqueduct components. (paper)