Seismic Collapse Fragility Analysis of Reinforced Concrete Shear Wall Buildings

This paper examines the behavior of reinforced concrete shear wall buildings subjected to strong earthquake ground motions, with a focus on collapse performance. The effect of varying the number of stories, shear wall and boundary element dimensions, and reinforcement detailing on the seismic collapse fragility is investigated. The buildings are seismically designed based on the ASCE 7-10 and ACI 318-14 codes with additional provisions for capacity design and dynamic amplification. The shear walls are modeled using the shear-flexure interaction multiple vertical line element model with nonlinear hysteretic material models. Incremental dynamic analysis is performed to simulate the structural collapse of the two-dimensional building models subjected to the FEMA-P695 set of far field recorded ground motions scaled to increasing intensity values. For each building, a lognormal collapse fragility curve is fitted to the results. A collapse assessment of the studied buildings shows how the seismic performance is significantly affected by the varied parameters.