A MATLAB-based application for simplified seismic analysis of RC shear wall buildings in Pakistan

Abstract

Pakistan is presently a seismically active region that is prone to high magnitude earthquakes. There is a constant earthquake threat; in fact, the situation may be riskier than what we perceive today. Any major earthquake in the Kashmir, Quetta and Makran regions will be catastrophic and will cause much greater damage than past earthquakes. The Baluchistan coast is vulnerable to a major tsunami, which in the case of occurrence, would also inflict major damage. Population centers such as Islamabad, Quetta, Karachi, Muzaffarabad and Peshawar are located on or near to major faults; therefore, there is a strong need to improve our earthquake design practices and also awareness should be raised with the public about the earthquake hazard [1]. Of the various methods being used around the world for Seismic analysis of structures, Equivalent lateral force method is the most practiced one. ELF is a Static analysis procedure which means that unlike the dynamic analysis, it doesn’t account for the time, earthquake loads are applied as a single static load, which makes it more conservative and less accurate, and therefore, costly. One of the main reasons why ELF is preferred over Linear time history analysis (dynamic analysis procedure) in Pakistan, is the lack of expertise of engineers here to utilize LTHA, which is a global design practice. Although the emerging trend around the world can be seen in the shape of Non-linear time history analysis that takes structural irregularities into account so it’s much better at mimicking structural behavior during dynamic loading but it is out of our domain as we believe that Pakistan still has a long way to go before NLTHA can be a common practice here, thus we focus on shifting form ELF towards LTHA. We took a sample mid-rise structure located in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, modelled it on ETABS and alongside, we developed an application on MATLAB, that would conduct LTHA and give results comparable to those of ETABS but in lesser time and with ease.