Damage potential of near and far-fault ground motions on seismic response of RC buildings designed according to old practices

This paper presents the evaluation of the seismic response of reinforced concrete (RC) residential buildings with the selected template designs in Albania considering their inelastic behavior of RC components. Four residential buildings having 5- and 6-story heights with template designs were chosen to represent the building practice in Albania before the adoption of today's modern seismic codes. Selection of the buildings and the material characteristics were based on site investigations after the November 26, 2019 earthquake sequences in several cities of the country. Pushover and dynamic analyses were deployed in both principal directions to obtain the seismic capacities of the selected buildings. The earthquake demands are evaluated comparatively under a set of far-fault and near-fault ground motions and the nonlinear dynamic characteristics were calculated using equally single degree of freedom (ESDOF) system approach. The impact of the material quality on the seismic response of the residential buildings were analyzed. Reasons of the observed building damages during the recent Albanian earthquakes were examined using the results of the performance evaluation of the selected buildings. The detailed analysis of the pushover curves and performance assessment identified the deficiencies and possible solutions for the studied typologies.