Comparison on the Effect of Earthquake and Wind Loads on the Performance of Reinforced Concrete Buildings

Abstract eng:
In the year 2004 and 2005, tremors from the Sumatran earthquakes had brought safety concerns to the publics, government authorities, engineers and researchers especially when no earthquake design had been taken into practices in Malaysia. This study addresses the performance of reinforced concrete buildings with the comparison on the effect of earthquake and wind loads for existing buildings in Malaysia, so that the adequacy of the design capacity can be checked. This study investigated seven existing buildings from West and East Malaysia. The buildings were categorised as medium and high-rise reinforced concrete moment resisting frames. The UBC-97, CP3:1972 and the MS 1553:2002 are used as the design codes in determining the lateral loads from earthquake and wind. The design capacity calculation for the frames was based on BS 8110. There are four types of analyses adopted; (i) Free Vibration Analysis (FVA), (ii) Earthquake Static Equivalent Analysis (ESEA), (iii) Static Wind Analysis (SWA), and (iv) Earthquake Dynamic Response Spectrum Analysis (EDRSA). Results from FVA showed that five out of seven buildings produced high dynamic amplification factor in the range of 2.01 to 5.16. These values showed that buildings were responding dynamically due to the fequencies of earthquakes from neighbouring earthquakes which are similar to the building frequencies. From this study it can be noted that the ESEA normally produced larger lateral load design forces than that from the SWA and EDRSA. ESEA also result in larger base shear and deformation response include greater lateral displacement and inter-story drift in the buildings. However under the ESEA, the performances of buildings were generally deemed satisfactory even under the low intensity of earthquake level (0.20g). Based on story drift response from ESEA, there are potential failures for the medium rise buildings at lower storey levels. While for high-rise buildings, the failures can potentially occur at higher storey levels. The inter-story drifts indicator indicates that only the non-structural elements of the buildings would be possibly affected.

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