Effect of weak and soft storeys on seismic performance of reinforced concrete frames with unreinforced brick infills

摘要

This has reference to the paper titled 'Effect of weak and soft storeys on seismic performance of reinforced concrete frames with unreinforced brick infills', authored by Patnala V.S. Neelima and R. Pradeep Kumar, published in The Indian Concrete Journal (Vol. 90, No. 2, pp. 19-26). Several past earthquakes have demonstrated that the open ground storey is vulnerable during earthquakes and is the cause of total failure of the structure, as shown in Figure 15. From this figure, it is clearly seen that the failure is confined to the columns and beam-column joints in the ground floor (GF) soft storey and all the other elements in the higher stories are unaffected (GF columns are imposed to large deformation and also plastic hinges are formed at top and bottom of the GF columns). In spite of this weakness, this kind of arrangement is still preferred in several of our big cities by architects and developers, since it is convenient to provide covered car park area in the ground floor. Thus the basic requirement of safety is compromised in these structures during earthquake. Hence they should be banned at least in Seismic zones Ⅵand Ⅴ.