Behaviours of reinforced-concrete building under tsunami loading

Abstract

The 26 December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami caused damage to many buildings and killed a lot of people in several countries that border on the Indian Ocean including Thailand. To understand the behaviour of reinforced-concrete buildings under tsunami loads, a generic one-storey building has been developed from the average values of the structural indices of residential houses in southern Thailand. The generic building has been analysed to capture responses under tsunami hydrodynamic forces. At each inundation depth, the lateral force has been increased until collapse. From results, the resistance of the building was controlled by the shear failure of columns at inundation depths lower than 2.57 m. The lateral resistances controlled by the shear failure were about 258 kN. As the inundation depth increased, locations of loads moved higher and the flexural failure occurred in the columns of the building. At an inundation depth of 3.2 m, the lateral resistance decreased about 50% from that controlled by the she...