An Evaluation on Seismic Performance of Existing Reinforced Concrete Buildings in Turkey

Abstract

It is known fact that the earthquake occurred in two decades have been caused serious pecuniary loss and spiritual damages in Turkey. Massive earthquakes revealed that the existing building stocks in urban regions are significantly vulnerable to seismic hazard. It is very important that earthquake safety of existing buildings should be determined as soon as possible and that unsafe ones should be strengthened. Investigations on the damaged buildings show that material strengths are very important parameters on the building performance. This paper aimed to determine the seismic safety of the buildings in risky regions in terms of earthquake and to evaluate general situation. Therefore,120 existing RC residential buildings are chosen from different cities to predict the general trend on the seismicity of buildings. The available material qualities are taken into account in the analyzes of the buildings. Analyzes were carried out by increasing the material strengths and the effect of the material strength on the earthquake performance was examined. Structural Analyzes Program (SAP 2000) was used in modelling of buildings and to obtain seismic performance of residential buildings. Nonlinear elastic procedures given in Turkish Earthquake Code 2007 (TEC) were applied in the analyses of structural systems.