Comparative Study on Reducing Soft Storey Effect in RC Structures

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-672-7_7How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Soft Storey; Pushover Analysis; Shear Wall; Steel Bracing

Abstract

This study aims to assess the seismic vulnerability of soft ground stories and propose potential solutions by comparing the use of concrete shear walls and steel bracings at the ground level. In our country, soft-story buildings are commonly used, with many multistory structures leaving the ground floor open for parking, without walls. Brick infill walls are typically placed on the upper floors, a design feature that is problematic in earthquake-prone regions. The open ground floor significantly increases the seismic risk of high-rise buildings. This research focuses on analyzing a mid-rise RCC building with G + 7 stories, featuring an open ground level, using ETABS V18.0.1 for pushover analysis to evaluate the structure’s performance with both shear walls and steel bracings. Several structural configurations were examined, including a bare frame, soft-story frame, soft-story with shear walls, and a steel-braced frame at the ground level, to observe variations in response parameters such as storey drift ratio, lateral displacement, and ground-floor stiffness. Among these configurations, shear walls were found to perform best, followed by cross-bracings. The use of shear walls reduced storey drift and lateral displacement more effectively than steel bracings, with storey drift decreasing by 96%. Cross-bracings and inverted-V bracings lowered the drift by 70% and 64%, respectively. The first-floor stiffness with shear walls was 10.6 times higher than that of an open-ground storey, while cross-bracings and inverted-V bracings increased stiffness by 2.7 and 1.8 times, respectively. These findings can aid in designing safer buildings with open ground floors.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Mostafa Mahmud
AU  - Md. Faiyaz Shahriar
AU  - Akib Mohammad Sunny
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/04/04
TI  - Comparative Study on Reducing Soft Storey Effect in RC Structures
BT  - Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Recent Innovation in Civil Engineering and Architecture for Sustainable Development (IICASD-2024)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 65
EP  - 76
SN  - 2352-5401
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-672-7_7
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-672-7_7
ID  - Mahmud2025
ER  -