Seismic Assessment of High-Rise Buildings Having Transfer Elements

This paper investigates the seismic behavior of high-rise buildings having transfer elements. Three constructed reinforced concrete (RC) buildings having either transfer slabs or transfer girders were analyzed using the response spectrum (RS) and time-history (TH) methods. For each building, the story shear, bending moment, displacement, drift, and time period were obtained. Furthermore, pushover analysis (POA) method was conducted to evaluate the capability of these buildings to resist the expected seismic loads. Results of the studied buildings showed that, the base shears obtained using pushover analysis are ranging between 50% to 83% of those calculated using the static approach. In addition, the response modification factors (R) for these buildings were calculated to show their sensitivity due to the irregularity of buildings. For the studied cases in this research, the R values given in the building codes were overestimated for the cases with transfer slabs and underestimated for cases with transfer girders.