Damage assessment of medium -rise reinforced concrete buildings in peninsular Malaysia subjected to ranau earthquake

Abstract

The paper presents an evaluation of medium-rise reinforced concrete building in Peninsular Malaysia which is subjected to low intensity earthquake effects. Even-though Malaysia is outside the earthquake region, the country had experienced and did suffer from major cases due earthquake in the past like tsunami. Engineers should concern and consider the loading for reinforced concrete building due to earthquake in the building design procedure. The study addresses the performance of critical frame reinforced concrete building when subjected to earthquake motion. Six (6) reinforced concrete buildings which are mostly categorized as medium-rise moment resisting frames have been selected for damage assessment. The effect of adopting a variation of low earthquake intensities (0.05g, 0.10g, 0.15g, 0.2g) in the assessment with the ground motion scale of 5% damped spectral acceleration was also assessed. The building was analyzed using Finite Element Modelling (FEM) using IDARC (2D) with respect to various earthquake intensities obtained from Time History Analysis (THA) data. The yield point at the beam-column connections was analyzed to determine the damage indices and damage level of the building subjected to the various earthquake intensities. The building performed the early yielding point at 3.22 sec for beam element at the intensity of 0.01g. Based on the results, it was found that all buildings can withstand an earthquake occurrence with intensity up to 0.20g. It can be appeared that the building was categorised in the moderate damage level where there was no structural damage but only experienced some non-structural damage.