Damage analysis of a reinforced concrete building in Santiago during 27th February earthquake, 2010

Abstract

A 19-story reinforced concrete building, two underground stories and one mechanical floor, located in Santiago, suffered significant damage during the earthquake in Chile on February 27, 2010, highlighting the failure of a wall in the first underground story, which spread through the section, with significant loss of concrete and buckling of the longitudinal reinforcement in edge and web. In the
present work it has been tried to obtain an explanation of the damage and to evaluate the possibility of predicting said damage from the results of linear dynamic time history analysis of a 3D building model, considering the three components of the seismic record. It was observed that a linear elastic model, under certain conditions, is capable of determining the most probable damage location, initiated by activation of a vibration mode associated with a large translational mass, determined by energy pulse arrival
at a specific time from the seismic signal (obtained by spectrograms) and whose frequency is similar to one of the fundamental vibration building modes. The criteria that the model must meet in order to approximately reproduce the location of the damage are evaluated, and certain normative aspects of the design are analyzed.