CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION
1.1 GENERAL INTRODUCTION

India at present is fast growing economy, which brings about demands in increase of
infrastructure facilities along with the growth of population. With the high cost of land in
most urban areas of India, the developers of residential and commercial buildings are eager to
accommodate the vehicular parking requirements within the front foot of the building that is
at the ground floor, while the upper stories of the RC frames are infilled with brick masonry
walls. These types of buildings (Figure 1.1) having no infilled walls in ground storey, but in-
filled in all upper storeys, are called Open Ground Storey (OGS) buildings. OGS buildings are
also known as soft storey, pilotis, or stilted buildings.

Figure 1.1: Typical example of OGS building

As per IS 1893 (Part 1) : 2002, a storey is called soft-storey (OGS) if the lateral stiffness of a
particular storey is less than 70% of stiffness of adjacent storey or less than 80% of the
average lateral stiffness of three storeys above the storey under consideration. A storey is
called extreme soft-storey if the lateral stiffness is less than 60% of that in the storey above or
less than 70% of the average stiffness of the three storeys above. Stilts or open ground storey
buildings fall under extreme soft-storey type of vertically irregular buildings.

There is significant advantage of these types of buildings functionally but from a seismic
performance point of view such buildings are considered to have increased vulnerability.
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From the past earthquakes it was evident that the major type of failure that occurred in OGS
buildings included snapping of lateral ties, crushing of core concrete, buckling of longitudinal
reinforcement bars etc. Due to the presence of infill walls in the entire upper storey except for
the ground storey makes the upper storeys much stiffer than the open ground storey. Thus, the
upper storeys move almost together as a single block, and most of the horizontal displacement
of the building occurs in the open ground storey itself. In other words, this type of buildings
sway back and forth like inverted pendulum (Figure 1.2) during earthquake shaking, and
hence the columns in the ground storey are heavily stressed. Therefore it is required that the
ground storey columns must have sufficient strength and adequate ductility. The vulnerability
of this type of building is attributed due to the sudden lowering of lateral stiffness and
strength in ground storey, compared to upper storeys with infill walls.

Figure 1.2: Behavior of OGS buildings like as inverted pendulum

The open ground storey framed building behaves differently as compared to a bare framed
building (without any infill) or a fully infilled framed building under lateral load. A bare
frame is very less stiff than a fully infilled frame; it resists the applied lateral load through
frame action and shows well-distributed plastic hinges at failure. When this frame is fully
infilled, truss action is introduced. A fully infilled frame shows less inter-storey drift,
although it attracts higher base shear (due to increased stiffness) and yields less forces in the
frame elements and dissipates greater energy through infill walls.

In conventional design practice, the strength and stiffness of infill walls in fully infilled
framed buildings are ignored in the structural modelling thus the design in such cases will

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generally be conservative. But things will be different for an open ground storey framed
building, since open ground storey building is slightly stiffer than the bare frame, has larger
drift (especially in the ground storey), and fails due to soft storey-mechanism at the ground
floor. Therefore, it may be unconservative to ignore strength and stiffness of infill wall while
designing open ground storey buildings.

Figure 1.3 distinguishes the behavior of a fully infilled frame building and an open ground storey
building during the Bhuj earthquake (2001). It can be seen that the building which is on the left
has survived with minor cracks in the infill walls in the ground storey but the building on the right
side is an open ground storey frame, completely collapsed due to soft-storey mechanism in the
ground storey due to the absence of infill walls.

Figure 1.3: Typical failure of OGS building in Bhuj Earthquake

Inclusion of strength and stiffness of infill walls in the OGS building frame decreases the
fundamental time period compared to a bare frame and consequently increases the base shear
demand and design forces in the ground storey beams and columns. This increased design
forces in the ground storey beams and columns of the OGS buildings are not captured in the
conventional bare frame analysis, thus an appropriate way to analyze the OGS buildings is to
model the strength and stiffness of infill walls. Unfortunately, no guidelines are given in IS
1893 (Part1): 2002 for modelling the infill walls therefore as an alternative a bare frame
analysis is generally used that ignores the strength and stiffness of the infill walls.

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After the incident of the Bhuj earthquake, the IS 1893 code has been revised in 2002,
incorporating new design recommendations to address OGS buildings. Clause 7.10.3(a)
states: “The columns and beams of the soft storey (OGS) are to be designed for 2.5 times the
storey shears and moments calculated under seismic loads of bare frames.” The factor 2.5 can
be told as a multiplication factor (MF). This multiplication factor (MF) is supposed to be the
compensation for the stiffness discontinuity. Hence the aim of this thesis is to check the
correctness of the multiplication factor of 2.5 in the ground storey beams and column when
the building is to be designed as open ground storey framed building and to study the effect of
infill strength and stiffness in the seismic analysis of open ground storey building.

Non-linear dynamics analysis method is considered to be the most accurate but at the same
time it is most rigorous among all methods. Hence for the present study Seismic Coefficient
Method (SCM), Response spectrum Method (RSM) and Pushover analysis (PA) is considered
for the comparative study. To carry out these analyses a typical building model with two
different cases are considered as follows.

1. Without considering infill strength and stiffness (Bare Frame)

1.2 NEED FOR THE PRESENT STUDY

As experienced by the engineers at design offices the multiplication factor of 2.5 given by IS
1893 (Part 1): 2002, for open ground storey beams and columns, is not realistic and fairly
high for buildings and also the proposed multiplication factor does not account for
dependence on number of storeys, number of bays, type and number of infill walls present,
etc. This calls for a critical assessment and review of the code recommended multiplication
factor. Assessment of the multiplication factor (MF) requires accurate analysis of OGS
buildings considering infill stiffness and strength.

1.3 AIM OF PRESENT STUDY

The aim of the present study is to investigate the behavior of open ground storey in
multistoried RC framed buildings and to check the correctness of the multiplication factor of
2.5 in the ground storey beams and column when the building is to be designed as open
ground storey. For this purpose buildings having generic plan with P+7, P+9 and P+11 storied
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height, situated in seismic zones moderate to very severe (III, IV and V) and in soil type-II
(medium soil) is considered. Also linear and non-linear seismic analysis is carried out on bare
framed and open ground storey framed building models to study the effect of open ground
storey on various seismic parameters.

1.4 OBJECTIVES OF PRESENT STUDY

Based on the literature review presented in Chapter 2, the salient objectives of the present
study have been identified as follows:

It is proposed to perform the seismic analysis of multistoried RCC framed buildings having
open ground storey in following ways-

 Linear and Non-Linear seismic analysis of multistoried high rise open ground storey
RCC buildings will be performed including strength and stiffness effects of infills.
 Checking the correctness of multiplication factor of 2.5 for beams and columns as well
as 1.5 for frames with shear wall of soft storey (OGS) as given in Indian Standard (IS
1893 (Part 1): 2002) for the design of open ground storey buildings.
 It is proposed to evaluate most optimum approach of soft storey design for various
seismic zones.

1.5 OUTLINE OF THESIS

This introductory chapter (Chapter one) gives a brief introduction to the importance of the
seismic evaluation of open ground storey framed buildings. The behavior of bare frames,
infilled frames and open ground storey frames under the action of lateral load is also
discussed in this chapter. Further the need of present study, aim of present study and
objectives of the proposed study are identified and presented in this chapter.

Chapter two presents a key literature review on the behavior of open ground storey frames
under the action of lateral loading. The literature review deals with the summary of technical
papers published till date and also focuses on the extensive research significances carried out
up till now regarding this dissertation and highlighted the scope for further studies.

Chapter three deals with behavior of open ground storey frames, codal provisions for soft
storey (OGS) buildings, approaches of modelling infill walls in RC frames, concept of
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equivalent diagonal strut, the basic concepts like earthquake resistant structural systems,
earthquake design philosophy, various methods of seismic analysis with their step by step
procedure which are needed to be understood in order to analyze and design of building
structures.

Chapter four describes the problem definition, detail description of selected building
configuration and total analysis cases considered in the present study. Also in this chapter to
investigate the behavior of open ground storey, the variation of seismic parameters for the
bare framed models and open ground storey framed models are presented. This includes
detailed tables and figures showing the variation of different parameters such as time period,
base shear, storey drift, storey displacement, member forces etc. for all buildings. Further the
behavior of OGS frames in dual system is discussed. The detailed observations and their
respective findings based on the results obtained during the analysis of frame are also
included in this chapter.

Chapter five highlights the overall conclusions of the thesis along with scope for further
study.