Verification of Simplified Pushover Analysis of School Buildings by In-Situ Tests

Verification of Simplified Pushover Analysis of School Buildings by In-Situ Tests

During the Chi-Chi Earthquake in Taiwan, 786 school buildings were damaged and 43 school buildings collapsed. Unfortunately, elementary schools and junior high schools sustained the majority of the damage. As there is a lack of seismic capacity for existing school buildings, solving this problem has become an important issue in Taiwan. For this purpose, various seismic evaluation methods were proposed by researchers to determine whether existing school buildings needed retrofitting. However, some of these methods require complicated calculations and packaged software. Therefore, a simple and efficient seismic evaluation method for estimating the seismic capacity of existing school buildings needs to be developed. Based on post-earthquake reconnaissance reports, school buildings in Taiwan typically collapsed along the direction of the corridor during an earthquake. Therefore, only the seismic resistance along the direction of the corridor is considered in this study. In order to realize how school buildings subjected to lateral forces behave, many in-situ pushover tests of school buildings have been completed in Taiwan by the research team at the National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering(NCREE). The Simplified Pushover Analysis(SPA), based on the assumption of shear buildings, is used in this study to verify the seismic capacity of Ruei-Pu elementary school by in-situ pushover tests. The results show that the analytical pushover curves agree with the in-situ pushover tests. Thus, this analysis will benefit engineers when predicting the seismic capacity of typical school buildings in Taiwan.