Seismic Design Provisions and Revisions to the Guides for RC Flat Plate Systems in the US

미국에서의 RC무량판 내진설계기준과 개정 방향

Seismic design of reinforced concrete flat plate structures is often complicated as it deals with three dimensionality and continuous spans, and mostly material complexity and reinforcement variation. A great degree of uncertainty in such structural and material properties is thus inherent in the RC flat plate systems, and hinders simplification of the design process in terms of slab flexure, unbalanced moment transfer at a slab-column connection, and punching shear. For these reasons, there have been substantial changes and updates in building codes relating to flat plates and slab-column connections over a handful of decades. Also, for the same reason, some of codes never have been revised. As a consequence of nonsimultaneous development of each provision, it tends to confuse structural engineers when using a mixture of all different US code provisions. In this paper, in the step-by-step logical order, seismic design of the RC flat plate systems is re-organized and clarified to make it easier to apply. Furthermore, recent changes or proposed changes are introduced, and are explained as to how it will apply in practice.