EFFECT OF DIAPHRAGM DISCONTINUITY IN THE SEISMIC RESPONSE OF MULTI-STOREY BUILDING

Abstract

Many buildings in the present scenario have irregular configurations both in elevation and plan. These in future may be subjected to devastating earthquakes. It is necessary to identify the performance of the structures to withstand against disaster for both new and existing buildings. Now a day’s opening in the floors is common for many reasons like stair cases, lighting architectural etc., These openings in diaphragms cause stresses at discontinuous joints with building elements. Discontinuous diaphragms are designed without stress calculations and are thoughtabout to be adequate ignoring any gap effects. In this paper an attempt is made to try to know the difference between a building with diaphragm discontinuity and a building without diaphragm discontinuity. This present paper makes a humble effort to portrait the behavior of the five different multi storied buildings with diaphragm openings under response spectrum analysis using ETABS v 9.7.4 To achieve this objective, various models with varying diaphragm openings were analyzed and compared for seismic parameters like maximum dead load, base shear, maximum storey drifts, and response spectrum results