Earthquake behavior of reinforced concrete framed buildings on hill slopes

Abstract

Recent earthquakes, 18 Sep 2011, Sikkim earthquake, M6.9 and 1 May 2013 Doda earthquake, M5.8 produced two major effects, namely on buildings and on hill slopes. The maximum intensity of ground shaking experienced during these earthquakes was only about VI or less on the MSK scale. Considering the low intensity of ground shaking inthe affected areas, the damage attributed was disproportionately higher. It ismainly due to high amplification in local site areas. In this regard, a research is carried out to understand the performance of buildings on hill slopes. In this paper, the study of the behavior of a G+3 building on varying slope angles i.e., 15°, 30°, 45°and 60° is studied and compared with the same on the flat ground. Building is designed as per IS 456 and later subjected to earthquake loads. It was observed that as the slope angle is increasing, building is becoming stiffer. Two types of analyses were conducted viz., lateral load analysis and incremental dynamic analysis. It was observed from the initial results that the columns on the higher side of the slope i.e., short columns were subjected to more shear force then longer columns on the lower side. Finite element method is used to study the static behavior where as Applied Element Method (AEM) is used to perform incremental dynamic analysis.