Effect of ground floor height on the dynamic behavior of a multi-storey building considering soil-structure interaction

Today, many engineering structures such as residences, business centers, health facilities and schools are generally built with reinforced concrete. Heavy damage or collapse of these structures due to earthquakes can seriously endanger the safety of life and property. Therefore, it is of great importance to reveal the behavior of reinforced concrete structural systems under earthquake loads with various modeling approximations. It is a known fact that the natural vibration periods of the structure and the internal forces that will occur in the structure may change depending on the soil properties in the analyzes carried out considering the soil-structure interaction mechanism. In addition, due to the complex structure of the soil, the subject of investigating the interaction effects on the seismic behavior of reinforced concrete structures is still up-to-date. The main target of this study is to examine the effects of ground floor height change on the dynamic behavior of a 15-storey building considering soil-structure interaction. In line with this target, numerical models were established considering three different ground floor heights and four different foundation soil systems through the ANSYS package program, and these models were analyzed under three different earthquake loadings with different frequency content. Analysis results were discussed comparatively in terms of displacements, relative storey drifts, accelerations and stresses. The results indicated that these responses may vary depending on the ground floor height, soil-structure interaction and earthquake frequency content.