Performance-Based Design of an Irregular RC Structure with and without Supplemental Damping

Many countries are undertaking changes in earthquake design codes, the main reason for it is that the existing building codes do not specify the performance criteria of individual structural elements under various levels of shaking. Even though some buildings performed well in life safety aspects, many of those failed in safeguarding the building from high extent of structural damage under severe shaking. Retrofitting had also proved to be uneconomical for the buildings to perform better under severe shaking. In the current earthquake codes, the displacements and forces are within the elastic limit i.e., the assumed behaviour is linear. But the response of a structure to the major earthquakes is not elastic. There is a high chance of yielding and the development of plastic hinges in the members. Therefore, it is required to perform the non-linear analysis for assessing the inelastic behaviour of the structure. In the present study non-linear static analysis was adopted to assess the seismic performance of an irregular building in plan with re-entrant corners using the capacity spectrum method. If either the drift limit of the structure or the response of the hinges is exceeding the desired level of performance, the structure is fed with supplemental damping to ensure the required performance. It was observed that the formation of hinges crossed life safety level and entered the collapse prevention state. As the response exceeded the desired level of performance a methodology to calculate the required supplemental damping for the structure is proposed. Depending on the level of safety of the structure, an appropriate supplemental damping value can be obtained from the proposed performance plots.