A simulated design procedure for the assessment of seismic capacity of existing reinforced concrete buildings

This paper presents the general criteria and implementation of an automatic procedure to evaluate the seismic capacity of existing reinforced concrete (RC) regular buildings. The method represents a useful tool in the framework of mechanical based vulnerability assessment methods. In particular, the seismic capacity is retrieved via pushover analyses on a lumped plasticity model for the building. Unlike recent approaches that rely on a single representative structural model for an entire building population, the proposed method allows virtually all the buildings of the population to be analysed in an automatic loop. With the aim of expediting and automatizing the analysis process, a dedicated software was implemented, whose main functions are: identifying possible structural systems compatible with regular building shapes of assigned dimensions and designing its elements in terms of cross-section and reinforcement: constructing the related nonlinear model and performing pushover analyses in order to determine synthetic capacity parameters useful for preliminary vulnerability assessment at a large scale. The software application and potentialities are shown in an example for the generic building of a class. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.