초록
Chile is characterized by the largest seismicity in the world which produces strong earthquakes every $83{\pm}9years$ in the Central part of Chile, where it is located Santiago, the capital of Chile. The short interval between large earthquakes magnitude 8.5 has conditioned the Chilean seismic design practice to achieve almost operational performance level, despite the fact that the Chilean Code declares a scope of life safe performance level. Several Indexes have been widely used throughout the years in Chile to evaluate the structural characteristics of concrete buildings, with the intent to find a correlation between general structural conception and successful seismic performance. The Indexes presented are related only to global response of buildings under earthquake loads and not to the behavior or design of individual elements. A correlation between displacement demand and seismic structural damage is presented, using the index $H_o/T$ and the concrete compressive strain ${\varepsilon}_c$. Also the Chilean seismic design codes pre and post 2010 Maule earthquake are reviewed and the practice in seismic design vs Performance Based Design is presented. Performance Based Design procedures are not included in the Chilean seismic design code for buildings, nevertheless the earthquake experience has shown that the response of the Chilean buildings has been close to operational. This can be attributed to the fact that the drift of most engineered buildings designed in accordance with the Chilean practice falls below 0.5%. It is also known by experience that for frequent and even occasional earthquakes, buildings responded elastically and thus with "fully operational" performance. Taking the above into account, it can be said that, although the "basic objective" of the Chilean code is similar to the SEAOC VISION2000 criteria, the actual performance for normal buildings is closer to the "Essential/Hazardous objective".