Seismic Analysis of High-Rise Buildings with Transfer Slabs: State-of-the-Art-Review

In many high-rise buildings, architectural requirements may result in a variable configuration for the vertical structural elements between the stories of the building. To accommodate such vertical elements' discontinuity, a "transfer" floor conveying vertical and lateral loads between upper and lower stories must be introduced. A drawback of the transfer floor is the sudden change in the building's lateral stiffness at its level: the structure becomes susceptible to the formation of a soft-storey mechanism under moderate to severe earthquakes. These buildings generally showed conventional elastic behavior for frequent earthquake but suffer extensive crack in the vicinity of transfer floors for rare earthquake. In this paper, a state of the art review is presented on recent publications dealing with the seismic behavior of high rise buildings with transfer floor.