Evaluation of factors influencing the earthquake-resistant design of reinforced concrete frames according to Eurocode 8

Abstract

The impact of factors which affect the performance of regular-reinforced concrete frame buildings designed according to the Eurocodes is investigated. The introduction of a sequence of variants of a structure, which gradually takes into account the design factors, makes it possible to measure the level of impact of an individual design factor on the global structural and performance parameters. The proposed procedure was applied to several regular reinforced concrete frame buildings, which were designed for ductility class medium and located in a region with moderate seismicity. A comparison between the reduction factor and the behaviour factor revealed that the behaviour factor defined in Eurocode 8, which significantly affects the design seismic action, is based more on the expert elicitation rather than on a firm scientific basis. Furthermore, based on the results of the investigated buildings it is shown that the design factors which are simply adopted in the design often have a significant impact on the resulting structures and their performance, whereas some other design factors, which require analysis of the structure and a lot of labour by engineers, often have only a minor effect on the performance of a structure.

Keywords:

• Seismic design
• design factors
• Eurocodes
• behaviour factor
• pushover analysis
• dynamic analysis
• reliability of structures
• seismic risk

Acknowledgements

The results presented in this paper are based on work supported by the Slovenian Research Agency. This support is hereby gratefully acknowledged.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.