This paper compares base shear computed from floor accelerations (inertial base shear) and column shears (structural base shear) for several single-degree-of-freedom (SDF) systems and two mid-rise, multi-story buildings due to a suite of 30 earthquake ground motions. The presented results show that the inertial base shear is close to structural base shear in short-period (<1 sec) SDF systems bu...

Seismic resiliency of new buildings has improved over the years due to enhancements in seismic codes and design practices. However, existing buildings designed and built under earlier codes are vulnerable and require a performance-based screening and retrofit prioritization. The performance modifiers considered are soft story, weak story, and the quality of construction, which are collated thro...

The present study evaluates how the soft first story irregularity condition should be defined: (a) as a significant reduction of the lateral shear stiffness of all resisting frames within a given story, as established in the seismic provisions of Mexican building codes or, (b) as a substantial reduction of the lateral shear stiffness of one or more resisting frames within a given story, as prop...

A method to predict the column size for displacement based design of reinforced concrete frame buildings with higher target inter storey drift is reported here. The column depth derived from empirical relation as a function of given beam section, target inter-story drift, building plan features and common displacement based design parameters is used. Regarding the high drift requirement, a mini...

With rapid population growth over the past 30 years and no significance seismic activity during this period, the unchecked development of the built environment in Bangladesh has been resulted in little resilience to earthquake. Identifying buildings due to this unchecked development that has high vulnerability is of critical importance both for reliable loss estimation as a result of an expecte...

The main objective of the present work is to study the present situation of the precast construction industry in India. Suggestions for improvement of the industry and study on cost effectiveness of precast concrete construction for single and multi-story residential buildings are to be given. A literature survey was carried out in order to obtain the comparison between the conventional buildin...

This research reveals the efficiency of seismic isolation system in the form of rubber-metal supports with different height buildings at multi component seismic impact. As an example, seismically insulated monolithic reinforced concrete 5, 9 and 16 story buildings are considered. The solution of the problem is obtained by a direct integration of the motion equations for an explicit scheme in fi...

In this paper a simple model of a three story building with inclined first-story columns has presented. The stories are supposed to be rigid and are connected to axially rigid mass less columns by elasto-plastic rotational springs and linear rotational dampers. The considered model is subjected to horizontal component of fault normal pulse with different magnitudes and the governed nonlinear di...

This paper presents a performance evaluation of two passive cooling strategies, daytime ventilation and night cooling, for a generic, six-story suburban apartment building in Beijing and Shanghai. The investigation uses a coupled, transient simulation approach to model heat transfer and airflow in the apartments. Wind driven ventilation is simulated using computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Occ...