Cost comparison for non-seismic (EC2) and seismic (EC8) design in different ductility class

Abstract

Earthquakes in Malaysia, such as 2008 Bukit Tinggi and 2015 Ranau Earthquake, have caused Malaysian authorities to look into the importance of seismic design for their buildings and bridges. The lack of information in British Standard (BS) about seismic activity is because the seismic hazard is very low in the British region, hence, the design of bridge structures resistant to earthquake are ignored. However, Malaysia faces a different situation regarding the seismic point of view. Peninsular Malaysia is located only300 kilometres away from the Sumatra faults, where the probability of 8 Magnitude in Richter Scale has shown that the long-distant earthquake effect cannot to be neglected. Eurocode 8 (EC8) gives meaningful guidelines to engineers on how to design their structures with seismic considerations, and the impact of rising costs is still an important agenda item that needs to be discussed. This study estimates the requirement of reinforcement between non-seismic (Eurocode 2, EC2) and seismic design by using EC8 with different ductility class. Three zones with different Peak Ground Acceleration (PGA) value has been chosen, namely Kedah or Johor (low ductility 0.06g), Penang or Kuala Lumpur (medium ductility 0.08g) and Lahad Datu (medium ductility 0.14g). The results shows that the quantity of reinforcement requirement for beams had increased between 7% to 32.4%, while columns increased between 28% to 420.3% for different ductility class. In addition, the cost of construction is becoming more expensive because the cost of reinforcement requirement is increasing with the increase of ductility class from low to Medium.