Using ambient vibration measurements to generate experimental floor response spectra and inter-story drift curves of Reinforced Concrete (RC) buildings

Achieving the global good seismic performance of a building as required in modern building codes is contingent upon maintaining the integrity and functionality of its structural system as well as its Non-Structural Components (NSCs). Experience of past earthquakes has shown that many buildings have suffered from the failure of NSCs, which caused life safety hazards, costly property damages, and significantly impacted the building functionality. Avoiding these undesired consequences is of great importance particularly in post-disaster buildings that have to remain operational during and after earthquakes. In spite of advances in seismic analysis of NSCs, there is still a need for a simple, practical and yet reasonably accurate approach for seismic design of NSCs. To gain acceptance in practice, this approach must be capable of circumventing the shortcomings of existing analytical approaches as well as of current building code provisions. This study proposes an original experimental approach to generate the Floor Response Spectra (FRS) and Inter-Story Drift (ISD) curves based on Ambient Vibration Measurements (AVM) in buildings. These outputs provide robust tools for the seismic evaluation of NSCs. This paper presents the application of the proposed method to a RC building. It addresses the dependence of the output results on NSC response parameters such as NSC location in the building, NSC dynamic properties (internal damping and natural periods), and natural periods of the building. The comparison of the results with the NBCC 2015 (National Building Code of Canada) provisions for NSCs shows that these empirical recommendations typically underestimate the seismic demands on NSCs.