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Quantitative seismic loss assessment has become an increasingly popular tool for evaluating the seismic performance of structures. The growth in popularity is largely in response to a desire to look beyond the traditional life safety performance objective and instead consider also economic losses and downtime due to earthquakes. A key step in the loss assessment calculation process is relating damage in both structural and nonstructural components to appropriate repair strategies and subsequently repair costs and repair times. This is achieved through the use of so-called consequence functions, which in this paper are derived specifically for the New Zealand context. Furthermore, a framework is established for other researchers and professional engineers to continue to build on and improve the initial dataset. It is shown that using New Zealand specific consequence functions can have a noticeable effect on estimates of expected annual loss when compared to a benchmark case using consequence functions from FEMA P-58. The opportunity is also taken to evaluate the impact of recent updates to the New Zealand National Seismic Hazard Model, with the results for a case-study building in Wellington indicating that the change in hazard has a far more significant effect on estimates of loss when compared to the choice of different consequence functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fire sprinkler systems damaged during earthquakes can compromise the functionality of a building facility either by loss of fire protection and/or by damage due to flooding. Shake table tests were conducted on a sprinkler piping specimen, with features representative of actual practices in New Zealand, to characterize its dynamic behavior under seismic floor excitation. The aim of the testing was to signify the need for a reliable procedure in the relevant New Zealand Standard (NZS 4541) for the estimation of seismic demands on these systems. The specimen was subjected to a set of motions including recorded floor acceleration response histories of an instrumented building in New Zealand. This paper first describes the test setup and the piping specimen and then discusses the seismic response of the specimen to multiple floor motions for different bracing variations. The testing showed that bracing segments of piping other than the distribution pipe modifies the dynamic characteristics of the system and consequently the seismic demands. The test results further confirm that seismic demands on pipes can be considerably greater if the system is in resonance with the floor excitation. Recommendations are provided for necessary improvements to NZS 4541 (2020) for a reliable estimation of seismic demands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A numerical study of unobstructed content sliding within several low-to-midrise reinforced concrete cantilever wall buildings designed to Wellington conditions in New Zealand is performed to validate the belief that increasing a building's strength and/or stiffness would result in more severe sliding response. It was shown that contents within stronger buildings experienced larger sliding response. If the building was designed to be strong, the sliding response of contents with a friction coefficient of 0.1 was smaller in stiffer buildings compared with those in flexible buildings. However, the trends start reversing with an increase in friction coefficient or a decrease in building strength. Overall, content sliding is not necessarily more severe in stiffer buildings, and in many cases, the opposite is true. This study's findings were compared against an existing parametric equation for estimating the maximum sliding displacement. This equation, which was originally derived for contents located within elastic frame buildings, was found to be more efficient than considering total floor accelerations alone but was underconservative by a mean of 17% for yielding multistorey buildings. A design procedure considering content sliding using the parametric equation and an example are provided. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]