Seismic Performance Assessment of a Typical Masonry Buildings from Albanian Practice

Abstract

The main objective of this work is to evaluate seismic capacity of a typical existing low-story masonry building located in Albania. In the last decades, Albanian big cities especially Tirana has seen a rise in the population. Due to that increase of the urban regeneration a better knowledge about the existing buildings stock is required. In order to guarantee safety, functionality and the maintenance of cultural properties finding adequate analysis for the seismic evaluation and retrofitting is very important. For this reason one residential building with template design and material properties based on Albanian Civil Engineering Archive were selected to represent an earlier construction type during the communism period (1945-1990). For the numerical analysis procedure is used SAP 2000 software. Via this finite element analysis programme a detailed architectural and structural characterization of the building is performed. The case study structure is modeled by using the macromodelling approach. While doing the building analysis it is assumed that there is no damage over the time. The three storey case study building is modeled to study the global seismic behaviour of the structure using non-linear static (pushover) analyses. Non-linear static (pushover) analyses is performed to define the capacity of the structures. The capacity curves for the case study building showed that building do not satisfy the required performance levels. Due to insufficient performance of this building it comes the need to retrofit it. A complete discussion of the results is included. In the end, conclusions and future research needs are outlined.