Investigation of ductility reduction factor in seismic rehabilitation of existing reinforced concrete school buildings

Converting existing Reinforced Concrete (RC) frames into RC infill walls is one of the most efficient seismic strengthening technique due to its simplicity in application providing high rigidity, stability and strength in structures. On the other hand, this method affects the seismic behavior of existing RC structure in terms of the energy dissipation capacity or in other words, ductility reduction factor, Rμ. This research is an attempt to investigate the RC infill wall ratio effect on ductility reduction factor in terms of the seismic rehabilitation of the typical RC school buildings. For this purpose, nonlinear static pushover analyses are conducted for existing 3 and 5 story RC school buildings which were rehabilitated with different RC infill wall ratio. Numerical analyses are carried out by using the fiber element based modeling approach in the software, Perform-3D. Based on these analytical results, correlation between the ductility reduction factor and the RC infill wall ratio is obtained for the seismic rehabilitation of the RC school buildings. In addition, two mathematical expressions for the variation of the ductility reduction factor with RC infill wall ratios are proposed in terms of the preliminary seismic rehabilitation assessment of the existing RC school buildings.