Deficiency in current design of reinforced concrete structures due to Earthquake excitation

In the recent years, tremors resulting from earthquakes in Bangladesh were felt by occupants in many buildings. As a result, the structural integrity of these buildings has become a major concern. To address the issue, in this study time history analysis has been carried out to investigate the structural response of two proposed 6 and 9-story apartment buildings. Each building of this study has a different floor layout plan. The seismic performance is observed for different earthquake data with different frequency content. Both static (considering p-∆) and dynamic analyses were carried out. From this study it is observed that building drifts exceeded the drift criterion set forth in the Uniform Building Code 1994 (UBC94). This study concludes that while the two buildings were designed to comply with requirements for wind and earthquake load static in nature, they can be vulnerable to damages caused by dynamic seismic load due to excessive lateral drifts. The primary focus of this study was to investigate the displacement profile and inter-story drift from time history analysis that have been compared with the values from static analysis. Comparison visualizes, the structures designed considering static analysis may be failed in a dynamic situation. So new design criteria may be proposed considering dynamic analysis to minimize the drift effect on structure up to acceptable limits.