VULNERABILITY ASSESSMENT OF REINFORCED CONCRETE STRUCTURES, A CASE STUDY FROM ALBANIA

Abstract

Over the last few years, the amount of damage caused by earthquakes has increased. Such examples are the 1999 earthquakes in Turkey, the Wenchuan earthquake in 2008, the Haiti earthquake in 2010, the Nepal earthquake in 2015 in the world and the earthquake in Shkodra in 1905, the recent 2019 earthquake in Albania. During an earthquake, the failure of structures is the primary cause of fatalities. This case study presents research regarding the seismic vulnerability assessment of reinforced concrete structures, in this case two buildings, seven and five storey respectively. Both buildings are located in Durrës and had significant damages from the 26th of November 2019 earthquake. As the first step, a visual inspection of the structures was carried out to identify the structural damage and infill wall damage, and the differences between the structures. The next step was calculating the Priority Index using the “Hassan and Sozen” method. This index calculates and ranks the buildings by which is more vulnerable in case of an earthquake. The last step was modeling and analysing the structures using the software ETABS. After modeling period of the buildings was found, maximum and minimum stresses and story displacements using Response Spectrum analysis. For both, the index calculation and modeling of the buildings the ground floor plan was obtained including the beam and column dimensions