Earthquake damage to building equipment lowers the functionality of the building and makes it difficult to continue its operation. Methods have been proposed to assess the performance of a building via a probabilistic view of the damage or repair costs for its structural and nonstructural components in the event of earthquakes, to assess the functionality of the building against earthquakes. In these methods, damage to the components is expressed by probability distributions (fragility curves) of the damage against the response of the building frame. However, actual damage to building equipment occurs as a result of the response of the equipment, which varies with the vibration characteristics of the building and the input seismic motions. Furthermore, the relation between the equipment response and damage based on dynamic models has not been quantified or sufficiently verified experimentally. In this study, shaking table tests were conducted on three types of air-conditioning units to investigate their dynamic characteristics and assess their damage. Additionally, a dynamic model that reflects the degree of fixation of a hanging-support air-conditioning unit to the support members was analyzed, and its predictions were compared against experimental data to quantitatively evaluate the relation between the initial damage to support members and the response acceleration of units, with the goal of producing fragility curves for building equipment.

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