Evaluation and Comparison of Different Structural Systems According to Earthquake Loads

To a certain extent, the performance of seismic analysis and design requirements for a building is considered as a substantial subject amongst Civil Engineers. In general, the lateral force resisting system is the structural system that resists against lateral forces in a reinforced concrete structure while the structures are under seismic excitation. Therefore, the structural system consisting of different lateral force resisting systems, such as the shear walls, coupled shear walls and stiffened coupled shear walls are used in majority of the tall buildings. On the other hand, the tunnel formwork is one of the common structural types in regions prone to high seismic risk due to the inherent earthquake resistance of buildings. This study attempts to introduce the safest and the most economical system using different lateral force resisting structural systems of a reinforced concrete structure. These different structural systems are tested with different story levels for the purposes of predicting the safest and the most economical system. With this objective in mind, a parametric study was carried out based on the modeling of different structural systems of a reinforced concrete structure such as the flat slabbeam, the shear wall, the coupled shear wall, the stiffened coupled shear wall and the tunnel formwork system, with seven different story levels (i.e. 2, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 and 28). These structural systems were considered as case studies that were subjected to seismic excitation loading by using the STA4-CAD software. Turkish Earthquake Code-2007 and the Turkish Standards-500 were used with a linear performance analysis method to obtain the structural design of each case study. Out of the five currently available structural systems, the flat slab-beam and the shear wall systems were proved to be appropriate for different story levels. The safest and the most economical systems were those with up to 5 stories. The tunnel formwork system was proved to be appropriate for different story levels with 10, 15, 20, 25 and 28 story levels. The analytical results of that system are in parallelism with the results of other structural systems in terms of finding the safest system. Also, the results of the tunnel formwork system indicate that as the most economical solution when compared with the total construction cost of others structural systems. Keywords: coupled shear wall, stiffened coupled shear wall, shear wall, tunnel formwork and Turkish Earthquake Code-2007