Effect of the vertical earthquake component on the structural behavior of a regular reinforced concrete building

Since human existence, mankind began to create a healthy habitat and on this way faced with many obstacles. First of all, most serious obstacle is an earthquake. As time passes, the world evolves, people had to create different structures that could serve not only for life, but also for time. After the number of people multiplied, and began to live together, cities and megacities were built. For this purpose, were built new types of buildings. The rise of prices on land in large cities contributed to the construction of skyscrapers, and for this reason, civil engineers had to investigate even more about earthquakes. In the world it is considered that the vertical component of the earthquake is not particularly dangerous, therefore in the whole world in an engineering calculations attention is allocated to the horizontal force of earthquake. However, in some last earthquake results noted that the vertical component plays an important role in the destruction of structures. Therefore, this analytical study also has been carried out in the direction of vertical component of earthquake. This thesis consists of five parts. First part is introduction. In introduction were explained shortly about a scope of work and literature search. Second part of thesis is model design. In this part were explained about a model which will use in this work. The virtual model which designed as educational building was created with the help of computer programs. The model consists of five floors and has a symmetrical shape. The height of floors is 3 meters and distance between the columns is the same everywhere six meters. The static calculations of the building were calculated by the computer program Sta4-Cad and static design standard is TS-500, earthquake standard is TDY DBYBHY-2007. In this part of thesis were noted also about materials and characteristics of materials which used in this study. As the program of static design is not randomly chosen by Sta4-Cad, when choosing this program, it allowed to use Turkish standards. More on this part are given tables of reinforcement columns and beams. Third part of thesis dedicated to calculation method and earthquake records used in model analysis. In this section was selected "Dynamic time-history method" as calculation method. In an earthquake standard (TDY DBYBHY-2007) there are some requirements to the calculation method. In this study, for the analysis were first used only the horizontal (x+y) forces of the earthquake, and then the vertical (x+y+z) force was added. In this study were selected seven earthquake records from PEER database and these earthquakes like: Duzce, Imperial Valley, Kobe, Manjil-Rudbar, Northridge. About selected earthquakes are informed in the third part of this study. These earthquake records were not accidentally chosen because they have not only powerful horizontal component but the vertical component has destructive power too. In the fourth part of this study noted about the effect of horizontal and vertical earthquake components on the structure. This part of the work is considered to be the most important because here analyzes were carried out using the "Seismostruct" computer program. The purpose of the study is to analyze the behavior of the structure during the influence of the horizontal plus the vertical component of the earthquake. To determine the difference were chosen the axial and shear forces, story drifts and total displacement of the column and beams. Each earthquake record was applied to the structure one by one with horizontally and horizontally plus vertically component. Results were shown in table form. Last fifth part of the thesis is conclusion part. As a result, when the horizontal plus vertical components influence the building, the axial forces in the columns, especially in the middle columns, have a big difference. Although the shear forces did not show a significant increase in the columns, the difference in one of the seven earthquake records was fifteen percent. No changes were recorded in the shear forces in the structural beams. No significant changes have been found in displacement and story drifts too. It is difficult to make any proposals because the volume of analytical work carried out in this thesis are not large. But the axial forces of the column has changed with the appearance of vertical components. Therefore, in engineering calculations should to give a proper place to the vertical forces of the earthquake. Keywords: Earthquake, Vertical component, Horizontal component, Axial force, Shear force, Story drift, Displacement.