Seismic Performance of High-Rise Condominium Building during the 2015 Gorkha Earthquake Sequence

On 25 April 2015, a strong earthquake of magnitude 7.8 struck central Nepal including the capital city, Kathmandu. Several powerful aftershocks of magnitude 6.7, 6.9 and 7.3 together with hundreds of aftershocks of local magnitude greater than 4 hit the same area until May 2015. This earthquake sequence resulted in considerable damage to the reinforced concrete buildings apart from brick and stone masonry constructions. High-rise buildings in Nepal are mainly confined in Kathmandu valley and their performance was found to be in the life safety to collapse prevention level during the Gorkha earthquake sequence. In this paper, seismic performance assessment of a reinforced concrete apartment building with brick infill masonry walls that sustained life safety performance level is presented. Rapid visual assessment performed after the 12 May aftershock (MW 7.3) highlighted the need for detailed assessment, thus, we carried out nonlinear time history analysis using the recorded accelerograms. The building was first simulated for the recorded acceleration time history (PGA = 0.16 g) and the PGA was scaled up to 0.36 g to assess the behaviour of building in the case of the maximum considered earthquake occurrence. The sum of results and observations highlighted that the building sustained minor damage due to low PGA occurrence during the Gorkha earthquake and considerable damage would have occurred in the case of 0.36 g PGA.

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