SEISMIC PERFORMANCE COMPARISON OF MID-RISE MOMENT RESISTING FRAME AND SHEAR WALL SYSTEM

Nowadays, RC structural systems are being used in construction industry worldwide. The observed response of medium rise building, based on post-earthquake damage assessment reports, during the latest earthquakes in the USA, Chile, Mexico and Japan have indicated that buildings including shear walls and dual structural systems behave considerably better during strong shaking. The viewpoint that shear walls are inherently brittle is still held in many countries (correspondingly in the codes) as a consequence of failures in poorly detailed RC walls. In this investigation, several RC frames, with and without shear walls, are designed according to the seismic codes, and then their nonlinear duplicates are exposed to a set of severe quakes. The time history nonlinear analyses results of these prototypes are then used to probe the effect of the existence of shear walls through using performance based design method. It is concluded that in general the existence of shear walls results in a noteworthy decline in the seismic deformation demand. These changes happened in both the plastic rotations in main RC structural members and the inter story drifts ratio. Hence, it is concluded that the existence of shear walls mostly improves the safety of medium rise RC frames within the assessment framework of performance based design codes such as ASCE41 (2006).