Evaluation of incremental dynamic analysis of seismic behavior of RC buildings

Turkey is located on active fault zones. These active faults have been producing destructive earthquakes throughout the history. 1992 Erzincan, 1999 Kocaeli, 1999 Düzce and 2011 Van earthquakes have caused damage and loss of lives that cannot be compensated. Since it is not possible to prevent the occurrence of earthquakes and it is very difficult to predict when it will come to fruition, it is necessary to design and build resistant structures against this natural destructive hazard. So, performance-based design is of great importance. Incremental Dynamic Analysis is one of the prominent methods used to predict structural performance more accurately and more realistically. In this thesis, earthquake behavior of reinforced concrete buildings was investigated by using incremental dynamic analysis method. Two and three-dimensional reinforced concrete buildings were selected for numerical studies. For nonlinear dynamic analysis, three earthquake records were used for the two-dimensional model and five earthquake records were used for the three-dimensional model. These earthquake records were scaled according to the design spectrum defined in the 2007 Turkish Earthquake Code for different ground classes. In addition to this, nonlinear static pushover analyses were performed for selected buildings. Capacity curves of the buildings, the maximum response, interstory drifts and the moment-rotation curves were plotted that occur at selected element ends. These parameters were obtained from nonlinear static and dynamic analyses. The idealized dynamic pushover curves of the buildings were determined by using the maximum response values. According to the results, it was suggested that it is appropriate to perform incremental dynamic analyses in order to determine nonlinear seismic behaviors of reinforced concrete buildings more accurately.