Author(s)

Batool Wahba¹, Mohamed Sobaih², Adel Akl²

¹Cairo University, Giza, Egypt.
²Department of Structural Engineering, Cairo University, Giza, Egypt.

There is a global trend for seismic response improvement of new buildings to reduce cost and future damage. It is also important to improve existing structures that are designed without consideration of seismic load or using old provisions that cannot meet the new one. The objective of this paper is to draw attention to evaluate existing reinforced concrete school buildings, then to present a proposed methodology to improve the behaviour of such schools with low cost especially in a developing country. The proposed method uses overhead water tanks as a tuned mass damper. A pushover analysis has been performed to evaluate the existing schools and perform a feasibility study to select the best solution to achieve seismic response improvement of the existing structure. Of course, the proposed methodology can be applied easily to other existing structures.

Existing Structures, Tuned Mass damper (TMD), Seismic improvement, Pushover Analysis, Water Tank

Wahba, B. , Sobaih, M. and Akl, A. (2016) Seismic Response Improvement of Existing Prototype School Buildings Using Water Tanks, Port Said City, Egypt. Open Journal of Civil Engineering, 6, 117-130. doi: 10.4236/ojce.2016.62011.