Following an earthquake, rapid inspections to evaluate building damage are crucial to allow the affected region
to initiate a quicker return to a functioning society. To achieve this, structural health monitoring is increasingly
being used in practice. However, there are difficulties in installing sensors in all buildings due to various
limitations. One potential approach to address this issue in Japan is to use results from Japanese Seismic
Evaluation. Within this evaluation process, the story shear force and interstory drift capacity are estimated
from the section dimensions and bar arrangement of the vertical members for each floor and direction.
Buildings built prior to 1981, when the seismic codes were drastically changed, are more susceptible to
damage and are required by law to undergo the evaluation process. Thus, if results from such methods could
be used to estimate a capacity curve, which can then be paired with available ground acceleration data, a
rapid assessment of potential building damage could be obtained.
In this study, a method to derive a building’s capacity curve from the Japanese Seismic Evaluation results (i.e.,
strength versus drift relationship) is proposed assuming a linear force distribution across the floors. Moreover,
the study investigates the comparison of the Seismic Evaluation and pushover analysis, using experimental
results from a 6-story reinforced concrete building that displayed inelastic behavior and soft-story mechanism.
The predicted capacity curve indicate that the proposed method generally aligns with the responses from the
experiment, with smaller responses in the representative acceleration. The Capacity Spectrum Method was
then performed using the capacity curve to obtain the damage state, and the proposed method had the same
or larger damage states compared to the experimental results. These conclusions indicate that the outputs
from the Japanese Seismic Evaluation could be valuable for estimating building responses in a conservative
manner.