• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.53 no.5
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• pp.957-979
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• 2015

The present paper investigates the influence of the orientation of the ground-motion reference axes, the seismic incident angle and the seismic intensity level on the inelastic response of asymmetric reinforced concrete buildings. A single storey asymmetric building is analyzed by nonlinear dynamic analyses under twenty bi-directional ground motions. The analyses are performed for many angles of incidence and four seismic intensity levels. Moreover three different pairs of the horizontal accelerograms corresponding to the input seismic motion are considered: a) the recorded accelerograms, b) the corresponding uncorrelated accelerograms, and c) the completely correlated accelerograms. The nonlinear response is evaluated by the overall structural damage index. The results of this study demonstrate that the inelastic seismic response depends on the orientation of the ground-motion reference axes, since the three individual pairs of accelerograms corresponding to the same ground motion (recorded, uncorrelated and completely correlated) can cause different structural damage level for the same incident angle. Furthermore, the use of the recorded accelerograms as seismic input does not always lead to the critical case of study. It is also shown that there is not a particular seismic incident angle or range of angles that leads to the maximum values of damage index regardless of the seismic intensity level or the ground-motion reference axes.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.11 no.6
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• pp.1027-1041
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• 2016

Different incident angles of ground motions have been considered to evaluate the relationship between floor rotation and torsional irregularity coefficient. The issues specifically addressed are (1) variability in torsional irregularity coefficient and floor rotations with varying incident angles of ground motion (2) contradictory relationship between floor rotation and torsional irregularity coefficient. To explore the stated issues, an evaluation based on relative variation in seismic response quantities of linear asymmetric structure under the influence of horizontal bi-directional excitation with varying seismic orientations has been carried out using response history analysis. Several typical earthquake records are applied to the structure to demonstrate the relative variations of floor rotation and torsional irregularity coefficient for different seismic orientations. It is demonstrated that (1) Torsional irregularity coefficient (TIC) increases as the story number decreases when the ground motion is considered along reference axes of the structure. For incident angles other than structure's reference axes, TIC either decreases as the story number decreases or there is no specific trend for TIC. Floor rotation increases in proportion to the story number when the ground motion is considered along reference axes of structure. For incident angles other than structure's reference axes, floor rotation either decreases as the story number increases or there is no specific trend for floor rotation and (2) TIC and floor rotation seems to be approximately inversely proportional to each other when the ground motion is considered along reference axes of the structure. For incident angles other than structure's reference axes, the relationship can even become directly proportional instead of inversely proportional.