Structural Resistance of Reinforced Concrete Buildings in Areas of Moderate Seismicity and Assessment of Strategies for Structural Improvement

Abstract

Abstract:Moderate magnitude seismic events have occurred during the last decade in non-seismic areas and have highlighted that many existing buildings do not sufficiently resist these types of events. The objective of this work is to illustrate that most buildings dating from 2002-2010 constructed from wide beams, which were designed to previous earthquake resistance codes, do not offer a satisfactory seismic behaviour, and to identify which structural attributes can best help alleviate this problem. In this work the effect of a real earthquake of medium magnitude (Lorca, 2011) on buildings of three, five and eight stories with unidirectional frames of wide-beam concrete was assessed. The methodology included non-linear static (pushover) analyses and dynamic response simulations with the aim to understand the effect on the seismic performance of changing some of the geometrical and material parameters. Maximum displacements and capacity curves for the top floor of a set of representative buildings were evaluated and compared. In particular, capacity curves obtained from non-linear static (pushover) analysis are compared for different building configurations, as well as the maximum displacements obtained through non-linear dynamic analysis. This paper highlights the seismic vulnerability of buildings constructed between 2002 and 2010 and the results indicate that a higher density of infill walls (walls whose bricks are not part of the main structure) is the feature that most significantly improves the seismic behaviour of the structures analysed. Moreover, counterintuitively, incorporating stronger concrete and reinforcing steel and using alternative column arrangements only have a small positive effect on the seismic behaviour of these types of buildings.

Sustainable Selective Mitigation Interventions towards Effective Earthquake Risk Reduction at the Community Scale

“…Future studies need to address the analysis of other building typologies, e.g., RC frames with infills, whose behavior may be sensibly different to bare ones [47], or masonry structures.…”

Mechanical Properties and Seismic Performance of Wood-Concrete Composite Blocks for Building Construction

“…According to the Geological and Mining Institute of Spain, the Lorca earthquake was one of the most destructive earthquakes registered in Spain, despite its moderate magnitude (M w = 5.1). Further details of this earthquake exceed the scope of this paper, but a complete description along with its accelerogram and response spectra can be found in [59].…”

Optimization and Development of the Model for Monitoring the Deformations on the Airport Runways

“…The author of [24] researched the detecting of the deformations of the runway and taxiway with non-destructive methods: GPR, ground load capacity measuring device, thermography and the sonic/seismic method. The authors of [25] researched the condition of the runway by merging the data of the measurements obtained with the 3D-laser scanner, Heavy Weight Deflectometer and 3D-GPR. The authors of [26] researched the condition of the runway with the GPR and [27] used 3D-GPR (GSSI SIR-20) with a central frequency of 1 in 2 GHz for the measurements.…”