TITLE:
Seismic Evaluation and Retrofitting of Existing Hospital Building in the Sudan
AUTHORS:
A. E. Hassaballa, M. A. Ismaeil, Fathelrahman M. Adam
KEYWORDS:
Seismic Loads, Retrofitting, RC Building Design, Shear Walls
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Civil Engineering,
Vol.4 No.2,
June
25,
2014
ABSTRACT: Sudan is not free from earthquakes. It has experienced many earthquakes
during the recent history, and the previous studies on this field demonstrated
this argument. This paper focuses on the study of seismic performance of
existing hospital buildings in Sudan. The paper focused on studying design of
reinforced concrete columns of a hospital building considering two load cases;
case one is the design load including combinations of dead, live and wind loads
and case two includes dead, live and seismic loads. The building was designed
according to the Regulation of Egyptian Society for Earthquake Engineering
(ESEE), using the linear static method (equivalent static method). The analysis
and design were performed using the SAP2000 version 14 software package. The
design results obtained from the two cases of loading were compared observing
that the design based on case one was unsafe to withstand the additional load
came from earthquake, because the cross sections and area of steel for the most
of building columns are under the required values that needed to resist the
loads of case two. If the building is constructed according to the design using
the loadings of case one, this situation needs remedy. This paper suggested two
solutions for this problem based on strengthening the weak columns by inserting
reinforced concrete shear walls in the direction of y axis affected by seismic
load. Solution one suggests shear walls of length 2.5 m with different wall
thicknesses (15 cm, 20 cm, 25 cm and 30 cm), whereas solution two suggests
shear walls of length 4.5 m and 15 cm width. It was found that solution one
solved the problem partially because some columns were still unsafe, but
solution two solved the problem completely and all columns were safe.