Seismic performance of reinforced concrete residential building modeled using Ruaumoko2D program

Abstract

Earthquake is one of the natural disaster that cannot be avoided and could give great impact to the world and living things on it. Malaysia is located nearby two seismically active plate boundaries which are between Indo-Australian and Eurasian Plate on the west and between Eurasian and Philippine Plate on the east. Earthquake that happen along these boundaries could cause tremors in Malaysia. East Malaysia especially Sabah also experienced earthquakes from nearby countries. However, Peninsular of Malaysia is considered as low seismic region in Asia. Therefore, majority of buildings in Peninsular Malaysia had been designed by using British Standard Code of Practice which lack of seismic detailing and inadequate consideration of seismic loading during the design process. To secure the human life and increase the building safety, this study aimed to model the structural damage and assessing the seismic performance of five-storey reinforced concrete residential building located in Pulau Pinang, Malaysia which is still in the stage of planning, when subjected to peak ground acceleration of 0.12 g by using Ruaumoko2D and its associated program. The modeling results showed that the structural damages would occurs at the ground and first floor beam-column joints. The displacement ductility valued below 2 proved that the prototype building is vulnerable when subjected to seismic excitation. The maximum lateral strength, maximum lateral displacement and stiffness of the prototype building were also discussed in this paper. The findings of this study could help the engineer to make further improvement by incorporating seismic factor in the building design.