Most of the reinforced concrete buildings in Nepal are low-rise construction, as this type of construction is the most dominant structural form adopted to construct residential buildings in urban and semi-urban neighborhoods throughout the country. The low-rise residential constructions generally follow the guidelines recommended by the Nepal Building Code, especially the mandatory rules of thumb. Although low-rise buildings have brick infills and are randomly constructed, infill walls and soil–structure interaction effects are generally neglected in the design and assessment of such structures. To this end, bare frame models that are used to represent such structures are questionable, especially when seismic vulnerability analysis is concerned. To fulfil this gap, we performed seismic vulnerability analysis of low-rise residential RC buildings considering infill walls and soil–structure interaction effects. Considering four analysis cases, we outline comparative seismic vulnerability for various analysis cases in terms of fragility functions. The sum of observations highlights that the effects of infills, and soil–structure interaction are damage state sensitive for low-rise RC buildings. Meanwhile, the design considerations will be significantly affected since some performance parameters are more sensitive than the overall fragility. We also observed that the analytical fragility models fundamentally overestimate the actual seismic fragility in the case of low-rise RC buildings.
Relevance. A beam-column joint is a crucial zone in any frame structure that transmits the forces at the end of the members in the panel zone. The connection between the joints may be assumed as rigid or flexible one and it is not an ideal one to predict the actual behavior of the joint section. Methods. The displacement along the joint section is the most critical one that has to be taken care while designing the structure. In this paper, the flexibility of the reinforced concrete joints was studied under two different cases: in first phase, building having 3 storey including ground floor was taken and is analysed using SAP 2000 and secondly third floor shear wall with l hollow concrete mesh of column section was analyzed in same software and the flexibility of the joints was tested in terms of its stress and displacement parameters using different approaches such as link mass property, end length offset zone, panel zone rotational spring stiffness property. The results obtained from the two cases were analyzed with consideration of parametric study and variation of the stresses with displacement and are shown with comparative graphic.
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