Fragility assessment of high-rise reinforced concrete buildings considering the effects of shear wall contributions

Summary The effect of shear wall configurations on seismic responses of high-rise RC buildings is investigated in this paper using fragility analysis method. Four lower high-rise RC buildings that have the same plan dimensions and height but are different in configurations in lateral force resisting systems, were firstly designed following the standard code procedure. To consider uncertainties in earthquake motions, 16 real ground motion pairs were selected and scaled, then applied orthogonally to the four RC building models during the Incremental Dynamic Analysis (IDA). Fragility relationships were therefore derived based on the IDA results for the three limit states including slight damage, moderate damage and collapse to show the probabilistic comparison of seismic responses among the four buildings in both x and y-directions. It was observed that generally adding shear walls will improve buildings' seismic performance at all limit states. However, shear wall configuration also plays a significant role in seismic behavior of the lower high-rise regular RC buildings' and internal shear walls are generally more effective than external shear walls in improving building's seismic resistance. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.