Seismic vulnerability assessment of reinforced concrete school building in Nepal

Abstract

The school building built with reinforced concrete in Nepal confront high seismic risk during past seismic events. The vast extent structural damage and loss of human life’s and property was due to the poor enforcement of the standards, lack of ductile detailing and poor construction materials and practices in Nepal. The effect of earthquake excitation on buildings was ignored after the latest earthquake in 2015. Most of the school structures were used in full-fledged without performing any seismic evaluation. Seeing these situations, especially in Nepal, a vulnerability assessment of such school structures is essential. The seismic risk owing to future earthquake can be minimize by proper vulnerability assessment of the school structures. To this end, the purpose of the study is to evaluate seismic performance of school structure through both vulnerability and fragility assessment. The main research issues are explored through analytical method. For this, structural response parameters are analytically studied through linear and non-linear analyses by finite element program-based software. In dynamic analysis, numerical building models were subjected to three synthetic earthquakes Gorkha, El-Centro and Kobe. The fragility function of case study building structure was plotted with the probability of failure at every 0.1 g interval of PGA, which provided technical base for seismic vulnerability assessment of school buildings. The result indicates that the selected school building is found to be vulnerable compared with the standard international guidelines. The results of this study are more useful for different governmental authorities, emergency response organization who are directly involved for proper planning and implementation.