Seismic performance assessment of RC buildings: Case of "Bekir Pasa" High School

ABSTRACT: Early reinforced concrete structures present undetermined resistance to earthquakes. This situation is particularly unacceptable in the case of essential facilities such as school structures. For those countries which are located in the earthquake region determination of the building condition and deciding on possible strengthening methods is a necessity. Determining the performance of a building and classifying its safety level for a presumed earthquake will help to limit the damages during an earthquake. In this thesis determination of possible weaknesses of one of the old school buildings in Cyprus, Iskele (Bekir Paşa High School) is taken as a case study. All the buildings located on this site are low rise reinforced concrete frame structures that have been constructed before 1974 and are currently being used, except one building that has been constructed during 1980’s. In order to achieve seismic performance of buildings, first step is identifying the structural system geometry and material properties utilizing destructive and non-destructive testing, this allows engineer to create a model of structure representing the existing structural member’s section properties. Applying nonlinear static and dynamic analysis on created models will help engineer to find out the capacity of structure subjected to lateral loadings representing earthquake ground motions and behavior of structure subjected to actual recorded earthquake data scaled to design response spectrum. Nonlinear static pushover analysis and nonlinear dynamic time history analysis are employed in this study to find capacity and behavior of buildings. Framework of this work is to assess the performance of structures in event of an earthquake. Proposed methodology is applied on all buildings of Bekir Paşa High School in order to assess their existing performance subjected to seismic hazard. Performance level of structures is assessed according to specifications of FEMA356 and Lang’s procedure is utilized to classify their damage grades, finally obtained results are compared and weak points of structures are highlighted. Methodology studied in this thesis can be used to assess reinforced concrete frame structures designed according to Turkish earthquake code 2007 for future studies. Keywords: assessment, earthquake, performance, safety, analysis. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………