A PRELIMINARY SEISMIC ASSESSMENT PROCEDURE FOR REINFORCED CONCRETE BUILDINGS IN TURKEY

摘要

Reinforced concrete buildings are predominant type of construction in developing countries like Turkey. Seismic performance of these buildings, however, is not predictable through techniques based on scientific and technical know-how alone, because the performance of this construction type depends highly on secondary factors such as the soft story, short column, irregularities in plan and elevation, the material quality, workmanship and compliance to the designed detailing and sizes. The devastating scene after many destructive earthquakes in Turkey had re-emphasized the role of the secondary factors in the severity of damage observed. Although many procedures have been proposed in the literature to evaluate the performance of existing RC buildings, the influence of the secondary factors has not been included adequately. This study has been undertaken to develop an assessment procedure that takes into account the influence of structural configuration as well as the secondary factors. In this procedure, a basic capacity index is computed considering the assessed orientation, size and material properties of the components comprising the lateral load resisting structural system. This index is then modified by several coefficients that reflect the quality of workmanship, detailing and architectural factors. The procedure has been developed based on the data compiled from damage surveys conducted after the earthquakes that occurred within the last decade in Turkey. The method uses attributes of each building to rank their vulnerability within a given inventory. As a result, buildings with high vulnerability are classified as unsafe indicating that they would perform unsatisfactorily under a strong earthquake. The procedure is quite attractive for assessing the vulnerability of a large inventory of buildings because of the ability of arriving at decisions rapidly.