BEHAVIOUR OF RC MULTI-STOREY FRAMED BUILDINGS WITH WIDE THIN COLUMNS

Reinforced concrete (RC) framed buildings consist of several vertical load bearing members (columns and walls). The structural engineers have a tendency to model all vertical load bearing members as columns irrespective of their aspect ratio (breadth to thickness ratio). While using commercially available software package, if the structural walls (wide thin columns) are also modelled as columns, undesirable amount of longitudinal reinforcing steel becomes necessary. Hence a comparison has been made to study the savings in longitudinal reinforcing steel if the walls are modelled as surface elements (area elements) instead of line element. The incorrect modelling may lead to shear failure of beams during earthquakes which will trigger the collapse of building in an unexpected manner. It may cause loss of life. In this work, a typical symmetric RC building has been considered to study its behaviour, if the vertical load bearing members are modelled as surface/line elements. From the study it is concluded that attention should be paid while modelling the vertical load bearing members based on their aspect ratio. The effect of force distribution, time period, base shear and amount of reinforcement is studied in detail.