Earthquake Resistant Design of Structures
The vast devastation of engineered systems and facilities during the past few earthquakes has exposed serious deficiencies in the prevalent design and construction practices. These disasters have created a new awareness about the disaster preparedness and mitigation. With increased awareness came the demand of learning resource material which directly address the requirements of professionals without any circumlocution. While the recommended codes of practice for earthquake resistant design do exist but those only specify a set of criteria for compliance. These design codes throw little light on the basic issue of how to design. The proble!Jl becomes more acute as students graduate with degrees in civil/structural engineering without any exposure to earthquake engineering in most of the universities/institutes. The short-term refresher courses routinely offered by various institutes and universities for professionals achieve little more than mere familiarization with the subject matter. Any short-term approach td the learning process, which requires the relevant ideas and concepts to be assimilated, is doomed to fail. Realizing the practical difficulties of professionals ·in attending any long-term direct contact academic programme on earthquake engineering, a six-month· modular course in distance education mode was offered by liT Roorkee in 2004.
The course was well-received and culminated in a two-day orkshop at Roorkee which was attended by a large number of participants, providing valuable feedback. This book derives its origin from the set of lecture notes prepared for the participants with later additions to incorporate some of the suggestions made in the feedback workshop.
The guiding principle in developing the content of this book has been to provide enough material-at one place-to develop the basic understanding of the issues as required for correctly interpreting and using the standard codes of practices for earthquake resistant
design. The objective is to present the essentials in a clear and concise manner with adequate illustrations, while intentionally steering clear of some of the advanced topics which require more rigorous mathematical treatment.