Seismic Response of a 7-Story RC Building (2006)

Experience in earthquakes has shown that structural walls are an excellent lateral force resisting system but in high-seismic regions like California, buildings incorporating structural walls can be prohibitively expensive and difficult to build. Structural engineers in California have often questioned that the current design lateral forces for structural wall buildings renders this attractive lateral force resisting system largely uneconomical and that significant savings could be made if lateral forces could be reduced, particularly in the foundation and in the lower levels of the walls where heavy congestion is observed. This project consisted of a shake table test of a 7-story full-scale slice of a reinforced concrete residential building with cantilever structural walls acting as the lateral force resisting system. The objective of this research program was to verify the seismic response of reinforced concrete wall systems designed for lateral forces obtained from a displacement-based design methodology. These forces are significantly smaller than those obtained from force-based design methodologies in building codes in United States. It is interesting that new displacement-based design methodologies indicate that walls could be designed with significantly less amounts of longitudinal reinforcement and still perform satisfactorily by properly controlling interstory drift, and hence displacement sensitive non-structural damage, and by having sufficient lateral deformation capacity to meet the demands in a rare but strong earthquake. The full-scale structure was subjected to historical input ground motions recorded in Southern California that represent demands of earthquakes with approximately 50% and 10% probability of exceedance in 50 years. The project was funded by the Englekirk Board of Advisors, an industry group supporting research at the Charles Lee Powell Structural Laboratories at the University of California, San Diego.

Publications

• Panagiotou, M. and J. I. Restrepo, "A Displacement-Based Method of Analysis: Application to a 7-Story Full Scale Building Slice Tested at UC San Diego." ASCE Journal of Structural Engineering (under review).
• Panagiotou, M., J. I. Restrepo and J. P. Conte, "Shake Table Test of a 7-Story Full Scale Reinforced Concrete Wall Building Slice, Phase I: Rectangular Wall." ASCE Journal of Structural Engineering (under review).
• Moaveni, B., He, X., Conte, J.P., and Restrepo, J.I. (2010). "Damage Identification Study of a Seven-Story Full-scale Building Slice Tested on the UCSD-NEES Shake Table." Structural Safety, 32(5), 347-356.
• Waugh, J.D. and Sritharan, S. "Lessons Learned from Seismic Analysis of a Seven-Story Concrete Test Building." Jornal of Earthquake Engineering, 14, 448-469. 2010.
• Barbosa, A.R., M. Panagiotou, J. P. Conte and J. I. Restrepo, "Comparison of Dynamic Strut-and-Tie and Fiber Beam-Column Models for the UCSD Seven-Story Full-scale Building Slice Test," in Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Urban Earthquake Engineering, Tokyo, Japan, March 2009.
• Grange, S., Kotronis, P., and Mazars, J. (2009). "Numerical Modeling of the Seismic Behaviour of a 7-Story Building: NEES Benchmark." Materials and Structures, 42: 10, 1433-1442.
• Martinelli, P. and Filippou, F. (2009). "Simulation of the Shaking Table Test of a Seven-Story Shear Wall Building." Earthquake Engineering and Structural Dynamics, 38, 587-607.
• Hoehler, M.S., M. Panagiotou, J. I. Restrepo, J. F. Silva, L. Floriani, U. Bourgund and H. Gassnerc, "Performance of Anchored Pipes in a 7 Story Building During Full-Scale Shake Table Tests," Earthquake Spectra, Vol 25, Issue 1, pp. 71-91, 2009.
• Beyer, K. , Dazio, A. and Priestley, M. J. N. (2008). "Quasi-Static Cyclic Tests of Two U-Shaped Reinforced Concrete Walls," Journal of Earthquake Engineering, 12: 7, 1023-1053.
• Schotanus, M.IJ. and Maffei, J.R. "Computer Modeling and Effective Stiffness of Concrete Wall Buildings." 2008.
• Xuan Huy, N. "Seven-Story Building Subjected to Seismic Loading: Experimentation and Modeling." Asian Journal of Civil Engineering (Building and Housing), 9: 2, 131-139. 2008.
• Panagiotou, M. and J. I. Restrepo, "Lessons Learnt from the UCSD Full-scale Shake Table Testing on a 7-Story Residential Building Slice," SEAOC convention, Lake Tahoe, September 26-29, 2007.
• Panagiotou, M. and J. I. Restrepo, "A modification of the equivalent lateral force procedure for use in performance based seismic design of high rise buildings," 12th U.S.-Japan Workshop on Structural design and Construction Practices, September 10 - 12, Hawaii, 2007.
• Hoehler, M.S., J. F. Silva, L. Floriani, U. Bourgund, H. Gassner, J. I. Restrepo and M. Panagiotou, "Full-scale shake table test of pipes anchored in a 7-story RC building," FIP Symposium on "Connections between Steel and Concrete," Stuttgart, Germany, September 2007.
• Grange, S., Mazars, J., and Kotronis, P. "Analyse sismique du comportement d'une structure de 7 étages à échelle 1 en béton armé : benchmark international NEES." 18ème Congrès Français de Mécanique, August 27-31, 2007.
• Chourasia, A., "Digital Re-Creation of a Seven-Story Building Shake during an Earthquake", ACM Crossroads, 13-­3, 2007.
• Panagiotou, M., J. I. Restrepo and J. P. Conte, "Shake table test of a 7 story full scale reinforced concrete structural wall building slice - Phase II: T-wall section," Report No SSRP-07/08, University of California, San Diego, 2007.
• Panagiotou, M., J. I. Restrepo and J. P. Conte, "Shake table test of a 7 story full scale reinforced concrete structural wall building slice - Phase I: Rectangular wall," Report No SSRP-07/07, University of California, San Diego, 2007.
• Kelly, T. "A Blind Prediction Test of Nonlinear Analysis Procedures for Reinforced Concrete Shear Walls." 2007.
• Wallace, J.W. "Modelling Issues for Tall Reinforced Concrete Core Wall Buildings." The Structural Design of Tall and Special Buildings, 16, 615-632. 2007.
• Alves, S.W., and Noble, C.R. "Experimental Validation of LLNL Finite Element Codes for Nonlinear Seismic Simulations (Progress, Year 1 of 2)." Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, December 2006.
• Panagiotou, M. and J. I. Restrepo, "Model Calibration for the UCSD 7-Story Building Slice," NEES/UCSD Seminar on Analytical Modeling of Reinforced Concrete Walls for Earthquake Resistance, La Jolla, California, USA, December, 2006.
• Panagiotou, M., J. I. Restrepo, J. P. Conte and R. E. Englekirk, "Shake Table Response of a Full Scale Reinforced Concrete Wall Building Slice." Structural Engineering Association of California Convention, Long Beach, CA, USA, September, 2006.
• Panagiotou, M., J. I. Restrepo and R. E. Englekirk, "Experimental Seismic Response of a Full Scale Reinforced Concrete Wall Building," First European Conference on Earthquake Engineering and Seismology, Geneva, Switzerland, 3-8 September, 2006.
• Yang, F., M. Panagiotou, Y. Bock, J. P. Conte and J. I. Restrepo, "Shake Table Tests of a Full Scale Reinforced Concrete Wall Building: Integration of Real Time 50 Hz GPS Displacements and Accelerometer Data," 4th World Conference on Structural Control and Monitoring, San Diego, California, USA, July, 2006.
• Panagiotou, M., J. I. Restrepo and R. E. Englekirk, "Seismic Response of Reinforced Concrete Wall Buildings," 2nd International fib Congress, Naples, Italy, June, 2006.
• Panagiotou, M., J. I. Restrepo, J. P. Conte and R. E. Englekirk, "Seismic Response of Reinforced Concrete Wall Buildings," 8th National Conference of Earthquake Engineering, San Francisco, CA, USA, April, 2006.