Seismic performance of a two-story unsymmetrical reinforced concrete building under reversed cyclic bi-directional loading

Abstract

Abstract Reinforced Concrete (RC) buildings are often subjected to multi-directional loadings under earthquake ground motions due to the structural configuration and inherent multi-dimensional earthquake motions. Previous researches have been focused on individual components with a few bi-directional tests. Essentially no research data, including experiment and simulation, exists for an entire unsymmetrical building under reserved cyclic bi-directional loading conditions. To provide a context for this complex problem, a test on a two-story reinforced concrete building subjected to bi-directional reversed cyclic loadings was performed at the National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering (NCREE) in Taiwan to examine the torsional effect caused by the eccentricity of the building plan layout. The study was undertaken as part of an international collaboration project between the National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering (NCREE), Taipei, Taiwan and the University of Houston (UH), Houston, Texas, USA. This paper presents the experiment and simulation of the building specimen. First, the test program is summarized including the descriptions of the test specimens, the test setup, the loading method and the experimental results. Then the numerical analyses conducted using a finite element analysis (FEA) program Simulation of Concrete Structure (SCS) developed at UH are presented. The predicted results turned out to agree very well with the experimental data. The results obtained from this research can be used to correlate analytical tools, new design methodologies and the capacity of design codes of such complex structures.