Performance of Medium-Rise Buildings with Reinforced Concrete Shear Walls Designed for High Seismic Hazard

This work has evaluated the collapse fragility of a typical Chilean building for residential use, structured based on shear-resistant RC walls and inverted beams arranged along its entire perimeter, using the incremental dynamic analysis (IDA) for the evaluation of its structural behavior, using for this the 2018 version of the SeismoStruct software. This method evaluates the global collapse capacity of the building from the graphical representation of its maximum inelastic response, obtained through a non-linear time–history analysis, against the scaled intensity of a set of seismic records obtained in the subduction zone, thus creating the IDA curves of the building. The processing of the seismic records is included within the applied methodology to make them compatible with the elastic spectrum of the Chilean design, achieving an adequate seismic input in the two main structural directions. In addition, an alternative IDA method based on the elongated period is applied to calculate the seismic intensity. The results of the IDA curve obtained with this procedure and the standard IDA analysis are analyzed and compared. The results show that the method relates very well to the structure’s demand and capacity and confirms the non-monotonous behavior exposed by other authors. Regarding the alternative IDA procedure, the results indicate that the method is inadequate, failing to improve the results obtained by the standard method.