TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION .………………………………………….. 1

1.1 Introduction …………………………………………………….1
1.2 Need of the study ……………………………………………………..1
1.3 Objectives of the study..…………………………………………………..3
CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW …………………….……………….4
2.1 Literature review ………………………………………………….4
CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY ……………………………………….6
3.1 Building details ……………………………………………………6
3.2 Structural Modelling ……………………………………………………..7
3.3 Expected outcomes ………………………………………………………7
Reference ………………………………………………………8
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

1.1 INTRODUCTION:
Vertical irregular building are frequently constructed across the globe for functional as well as
aesthetic. However post-earthquake reconnaissance survey reports revealed high seismic
vulnerability of the building with vertical irregularities. Consequently it is crucial to explore the
reason behind their high seismic vulnerability in order to include their performance during
impending earthquakes.

A common form of vertical discontinuity arises from reduction of the lateral

dimension of the building along its height. This building form is becoming
increasing popular in modern multistory building because of its functional as
well as aesthetic architecture and in particular this building form provides
adequate daylight and ventilation for the lower storey in the urban locality
with closely spaced tall buildings. This building form also provides for
compliance with building bye laws restrictions related to floor area ratio
(FAR).

On the other hand, the practice of providing open providing open spaces for
parking and other services is becoming mandatory due to lack parking in
urban cities like Kathmandu. Design codes have not given particular
attention in such form of irregularity. Thus in the present study, approaches
of quantifying irregularity as well as comparison of the probability of
exceeding the certain performance levels of various irregular buildings with
regular buildings has been done

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1.2 NEED OF THE STUDY:
1) The review of seismic design codes and reported research studies show that the irregularity
has been quantified in terms of magnitude ignoring the effect of location of irregularity.
However, location of irregularity has a significant influence on the seismic response (Al –
Ali and Krawinkler 1998; Nassar and Krawinkler 1991; Das and Nau 2003). The cracking of
structural members is a realistic phenomenon during seismic excitation, and this results in
change of stiffness and strength (Paulay and Priestley 1992; Priestley 2003). This aspect has
been ignored by the previous research studies.
2) The estimation of fundamental time period of vibration is a critical step in seismic design
and analysis of the building structures as it is a represents the global seismic demands of the
structure. The period of the building mainly depends upon building properties like mass,
stiffness, seismic excitation, storey height, number of storeys, cracking etc. In reality, the
building models often encounter different forms of structural irregularity and cracking which
result in change of strength and stiffness of the building. However, these aspects have been
ignored in code proposed empirical expressions to estimate the fundamental time period.
Therefore, there is a necessity of modified equations to estimate the fundamental time
period.
3) The estimation of seismic demands is a critical step in seismic design process. The seismic
design codes like EC8:2004 have suggested the procedures to estimate seismic demands but
the aspect of irregularity and cracking has been ignored in formulating these
procedures. In other words, the seismic demands of irregular and regular structures are
estimated using same approach. In the present study, the inelastic seismic demands of the
irregular building models are determined.
4) In order to have a rational understanding of how the existing vertical irregularity indicators
(see table 1) correlate with their seismic risks, the present study evaluates the seismic risks
of selected buildings.

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1.3 OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY:
1. To review the seismic provisions for the irregular buildings in selected codes and try out
to find the missing parameters that deprives those provisions to describe the actual
behavior of the buildings.
2. To estimate the seismic ductility demand at the local level, storey level as well as global
level using various approaches and also an approaches to distinguish between them.
3. To perform probabilistic seismic risk assessment for the irregular buildings and check
the adequacy of the regularity index proposed by different previous literatures.

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 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 LITERATURE REVIEW:

Ali-Ali and Krawinkler (1998) carried out evaluation of the effects of the vertical irregularities
by considering height-wise variations of the seismic demands. They used a 10-story building
model designed according to the strong-beam-weak column philosophy and an ensemble of 15
ground motion for the study. The effects of the vertical irregularities in the distribution of the
mass, stiffness and strength were considered separately and in combinations, and the seismic
response of the irregular structures are assessed by means of the elastic and inelastic dynamic
analysis. They found the effect of the mass irregularity is the smallest, and the effect of the
strength irregularity is larger than the effect of the stiffness, and the effect of the combined
stiffness and strength is the largest. Roof displacement is not affected by the vertical irregularity.

Bhosale et al (2017) on their paper check the adequacy of the fundamental mode properties for
the quantification of the vertical irregularities. Further, their study attempts to the check the
correlation between the existing vertical irregularity indicators and the seismic risk in terms of
annual probability of collapse, fragility curves as well as drift hazard curves. Results of their
seismic analysis show building frames with open ground storey and floating columns are found
to be more vulnerable than a similar regular frame. However, stepped and setback building
frames perform even better than a regular frame. So, they suggested the investigations in detail to
validate the special design requirements recommended by the design code.

Bhosale et al (2018) proposed a new parameter, the seismic vulnerability indicator (SVI),
proposed based on the inter storey drift ratio damage parameter to indicate the expected seismic
risk of any building with single or coupled vertical irregularity. This paper also pointed
inadequacy of the previous research on the vertical irregularity based on the irregularity index.

Chintanapakdee & Chopra (2004): These authors studied in-depth the seismic performance of
generic strong column-weak beam high ductility special moment resisting frames with three
types of vertical irregularities: stiffness, strength and combined stiffness and

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strength. The influence of this parameters in the response of the structure
was studied comparing the median seismic demands computed by nonlinear transient analyses
for an ensemble of 20 large-magnitude-small-distance records. They found that introducing a
sws increases the storey drift demands in the modified and neighboring storeys and decreases
drift demands in the other. Irregularity on the upper storeys has very little influence on
floor displacements, in contrast, irregularity in lower storeys has a significant
influence on the height-wise distribution of floor displacements.

Das & Nau (2003): These authors conducted an investigation of the definition of vertical
structural irregularity based on: stiffness, strength, mass and due to the presence of masonry infill
walls. They performed linear and nonlinear transient analyze on an ensemble of 78 special
moment-resisting frames (SMRF) designed with the forces obtained from an equivalent lateral
force analysis (ELFA) according to the UBC1997’s strong column-weak beam criterion and
other recommendations therein. Observing that the majority of structures exhibited acceptable
performance when subjected to the design earthquake ground motion, however, the ductility
demands in the plastic regions increased in the vicinity of the irregularities. They concluded that
the restrictions on the applicability of the ELFA procedure found in most BC s is
unnecessarily conservative for certain types of vertical irregularity.

Varadharajan(2015) on his PhD thesis studied irregular RC buildings under the seismic effect
since most of the buildings collapse or suffers severe damage during earthquakes because of
sudden changes in mass, stiffness and strength along vertical or horizontal plane [Varadharajan,
2014]. In this study analysis of different models with different location of irregularities were
performed and then compared with the reference structure which was without any irregularity.
From the nonlinear static pushover analysis and time history analysis, an irregularity index which
overcomes the codes was evaluated. From the code and other research works was clearly
understood that the location of irregularity was always neglected in quantification of irregularity.
But these cannot be neglected because it has an important role in the presentation of irregularity.
Irregularity index proposed in this thesis captures both of them: irregularity and its location being
more efficient. Fundamental time period was classified as a critical parameter in seismic design
and seismic vulnerability assessment of buildings. Estimation of the seismic demand from

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various literatures is critically analyses and a new approach was proposed. Collapse capacity
assessment is also presented.

CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY

3.1 BUILDING DETAILS:

Three different types of vertically irregular buildings commonly encountered in construction

practice are considered in the present study: the setback building representing vertical geometric
irregularity, a building with floating columns representing in-plane discontinuity, and an OGS
building representing soft and weak story irregularity. A regular building is also considered as a
reference.

Fig
1:
Selected Buildings

A bay width of 5 meter can be considered as a globally common construction practice. The
characteristic strength of concrete and reinforcement steel are taken as 25 and 415MPa,
respectively. All of the building frames (except the ground story of OGS and FC frame) are
assumed to have masonry infill wall that are 230-mm thick. Modulus of elasticity of infill is
taken as 2,300MPa. The story masses are calculated considering the dead loads and appropriate

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portion of imposed load. The size (breadth and depth) of columns and beams are taken as 400 ×
400 mm and 300 × 400 mm respectively. The regular (R) building frame will be designed as per
IS 456-2000 for the highest seismic zone of India with peak ground acceleration (PGA) of 0.36g
as per IS 893. The frame geometries of the regular buildings are modified to obtain the irregular
buildings without modifying the design details.

3.2 STRUCTURAL MODELLING:

Selected buildings are modeled for elastic free vibration analysis and nonlinear time history
analysis for seismic risk assessments. The Open System for Earthquake Engineering Simulation
(OpenSees) Laboratory tool developed by McKenna et al. (2014) is used for all of the analyses.

In order to model the strength and stiffness degradation of the infill walls in the time history
analysis, a pinching material model which is implemented in OpenSees (Ibarra et al. 2005) is
used.

ATC 58 (ATC 2012) recommends a suite of 11 pairs of ground motions for a reliable estimate of
the response quantities.

Uncertainties associated with concrete compressive strength, yield strength of reinforcing steel,
shear strength of infill masonry, and the global damping ratio are considered in the probabilistic
seismic risk assessment.

3.3 EXPECTED OUTCOMES:

After the completion of the thesis work, following outcomes are expected:

1. Adequacy of the regularity index proposed by different researchers.

2. High Seismic vulnerability among various irregular configurations buildings in elevation.
3. Seismic demands at the local, storey as well as global level.

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References
Ali-Ali, A.A.K, & Krawinkler, H. (1998). Effect of the vertical Irregularities on Seismic
Behaviour of Building Structures. The John A. Blum Earthquake Engineering Center .
Bhosale,A.S;Davis Robin;Sarkar Pradip. (2017). Vertical Irreggularuty of Buildings: Regularity
index versus Seismic Risk. ASCE.
Bhosale,A; Davis, Rabin; Sarkar, Pradip. (2018). New Seimsic Vulnerability Index for Vertically
Irregular Buildings . ASCE-ASME Journal of Risk and Uncertainity in Engineering
systems.
Chopra, A., & Chintanapakdee, C. (2004). Seismic Response of Vetically Irregular
Frames:Response History & Model Pushover Analysis. Journal of Structural
Engineering, 1177-1185.
Das, S., & Nau, J. (2003). Seismic Design Aspects of Vertically Irregular Reinforced Concrete
Buildings. Earthquake Spectra, Volume 19, 445-477.
Sarkar, Pradip:Menon,Devdas:Prasad ,A Meher. (2010). Vertical geometric irregularity in
stepped building frame. Engineering Structures, 2172-2182.
Varadharajan S (2014). Study of Irregular RC Buildings under Seismic Effect. Ph.D thesis,
National Institute of Technology Kurukshetra, Kurukshetra.