In spite of the best efforts of the engineering community all over the world, structures fail after most major seismic events causing significant property damages and loss of human live. The world communities spent an enormous amount of resources over past several decades, conducting theoretical, analytical, and experimental studies, to study the structural response behavior caused by the seismic excitation. However, the success of such work has been very limited at best so far. Designing seismic damage-tolerant structures has been one of the major challenges facing the civil engineering profession over a long period of time.

The current seismic analysis and design procedures are not adequate and a major shift in the design paradigm is necessary. There is no doubt that the engineering profession has developed full understanding of structural behavior excited by a known earthquake time history. Unfortunately, the profession does not know how to predict a future design earthquake time history at a site at present. This presenter was awarded a major research grant funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation to develop the required paradigm shift in a comprehensive way to replace the current seismic design practices. The ultimate objective is to design more seismic damage-tolerant structures. The underlying seismic risk of a structure cannot completely be eliminated, it needs to be managed. Instead of conducting millions of simulations, can be impractical in most cases, the information on risk can be extracted by conducting only dozens of deterministic analyses at very few intelligently selected points. Multiple deterministic analyses will provide the new seismic design paradigm. This new design paradigm will be introduced in this short course, specifically addressing steel structures. Course participants will learn these topics through lectures, tutorials and case-studies.

Duration: 18th to 27th December, 2017

Venue: Centre for Education Technology, IIT Guwahati.