Evaluation of reinforced concrete buildings in terms of seismic design faults in North Cyprus

The most important phenomena in nature which cause many disasters, catastrophes, losses of life, and economic recession are earthquakes. Many engineers and scientists have been investigated this subject throughout the history, and it stands as one of the common matter nowadays. Numerous studies on this hazard lead to a better understanding of its effect on structures, and, therefore, a better engineering design. The aim of this study is to investigate the vulnerability of reinforced concrete buildings behaviour in city of Gazimağusa in North Cyprus which is situated in intensive seismic zone as a case study. In this region, structures have been commonly built by reinforced concrete. Generally, all the RC buildings in this area are between two and five stories. In this study, four RC buildings have been chosen as case studies. They have been modelled with SAP2000, and then nonlinear static analyses, also known as pushover analysis have been performed to evaluate the respective seismic capacities of these buildings, from which the respective damage states have been deducted considering the site seismic demand. These case studies have been loading with different lateral load patterns according to FEMA356 code. On the other hand, a rapid and practical assessment method which is named P25 method has been applied to evaluate collapse of these case studies. This method is a rapid scoring method which can evaluate vulnerability of reinforced concrete buildings without any conventional structural analysis. Finally the results of these two methods have been compared together, and the predicted performance levels have been discussed. At the end of this study, P25 method required the buildings on hand to be studied in details. Then, it has been found out from pushover analyses that case study 3 exhibits a performance level of grade 1: negligible to slight damage (no structural damage, slight nonstructural damage) according to EMS98, and the three remaining display a grade level 4: very heavy damage (heavy structural damage, very heavy nonstructural damage) according to the same classification.