A Contribution to Facilitate the Seismic Design in Lebanon Using Short-Length Spectrum-Consistent Earthquakes

Seismic regulations of developing countries are often grounded on rules of more experienced countries. The Lebanese regulations refer to four foreign codes, this excess of guidelines generating confusion and conflicting design choices. Moreover, the scarcity of earthquakes recorded in the Lebanese area makes it difficult to obtain suitable sets of spectrum-consistent accelerograms for dynamic analyses. Sorting through the reference regulations and the indications for their local application, this paper derives and compares all the design response spectra allowed by the Lebanese code. Consistent with the design response spectra of the two codes that are still in force (of the four referred to), some suites of spectrum-consistent accelerograms are derived. Based on the Arias intensity, a general procedure is also proposed to reduce the time duration of the accelerograms, while saving the earthquake energy content and, thus, the reliability of the results. Full-length and short-length spectrum-consistent accelerograms are thus made available for the Lebanese design. With reference to a two-dimensional model some comparisons between response-spectrum-based and earthquake-based analyses are provided, which showed that the Lebanese code allows different safety levels for earthquake-resistant buildings. The paper provides a very useful contribution to researchers and designers that are involved in the protection of the Lebanese building heritage from seismic hazards, and it also provides data and tools that can be more generally exploited in other seismic areas.