Abstract
Earthquake-resistant design method based on energy balance consists of three essential factors to be estimated -- whole amount of energy input, concentration of energy within a building and energy absorption capacity of structural elements. The first factor is very stable and the last has been well estimated. The second factor about concentration of energy is still needed to be cleared the more precisely. Concentration of energy is caused by the strength distribution within stories in a building mainly. The degree of concentration is governed by the difference between the optimum strength distribution and the actual strength distribution. However, the optimum strength distribution is not stable and can change for each seismic ground motion. In this paper, the influence of inevitable scatter in the optimum strength distribution on damage concentration is discussed.
