Numerically predicting influence of storey height on seismic drift of RC buildings

This research proposes a novel concept for evaluating seismic drift of single bay 4 and 6-storied reinforced concrete (RC) structures by varying inter-storey heights and span lengths. The equivalent static procedure is used for the calculation of seismic force coefficient for the numerical analysis to achieve this goal. The minimum difference of verification result between previous shake table test and present numerical analysis is obtained to be 1.4%, which may represent a good level of accuracy of the numerical analysis. The inter-storey drift of 6-storied structure is decreased at a rate of (52.2 ~ 59) % from the 4-storied structure by varying inter-storey heights. Also, the inter-storey drift is reduced at a range of (1 ~ 4.1) % by varying span lengths. So, variable span lengths are little impact on the seismic drift compared to the inter-storey heights. The maximum drifts of 4 and 6-storied structures are obtained to be 48.5 and 64.3 mm, respectively, from the numerical analysis results. However, there is a scope to enhance this research in future by conducting response spectrum and nonlinear static analyses to consider multi-bays with plan irregularity.