Abstract
In the past, several researches have been carried out to study the influence of shear walls on controlling the lateral stiffness/story drift of the RC buildings under seismic forces. But the level of increase in the reliability due to the implementation of shear walls was not studied much. In the present study, a simple Monte Carlo Simulation-based methodology has been presented by which increase in the reliability level due to the addition of shear walls in RC building frame was quantitatively assessed. In order to demonstrate the methodology, first a 10-story seismically deficient (in terms of lateral stiffness) rectangular RC frame building having no shear walls was subjected to an earthquake of known magnitude and its reliability against lateral drift was estimated. The building was then laterally stiffened by shear walls in the two orthogonal directions and reliability indices were estimated again in each direction. It was demonstrated that the shear walls improve the reliability against serviceability limit state of lateral drift dramatically. A parametric study was also carried out to obtain that value of story weight below which the building is as reliable as desired (i.e. reliability index >= 3.0).