Verification on simplified pushover analysis of school building with brick walls by in-situ test at Kou-hu school

In Taiwan, the elementary schools and junior high schools are low-rise buildings. They can not only be a place for students and teachers at normal time, but also can be an emergency shelter during earthquake. Unfortunately in Chi-Chi Earthquake, Taiwan, the elementary schools and junior high schools damaged and collapsed seriously. The damage concentrated in the vertical members of school along the corridor direction. It showed that the direction along the corridor of school played the main role to resist earthquake. However, not only columns are vertical members along the corridor direction, but also the brick walls confined with three sides which can combine with the windows for the requirement of the ventilation and natural light in classroom. From seismic database, it shows there are 43.6% of school buildings having brick walls confined with three sides in the corridor direction. It means that the brick walls confined with three sides are very common in school buildings in Taiwan. In order to ensure the existing school buildings to have adequate seismic capacity to resist next huge earthquake, it is an urgent need to do seismic evaluation for low-rise school buildings. In Taiwan, the software are used for pushover analysis to analyze the seismic capacity of existing buildings, there is also a method called simplified pushover analysis which can calculate pushover curves by hand without software for low rise school buildings. In order to realize the rationale of simplified pushover analysis for these common and important school buildings in Taiwan, in this paper, the simplified pushover analysis is verified by in-situ pushover tests of a school building in Kou-hu Elementary School. The capacity curves from simplified pushover analysis and in-situ pushover tests are compared. The comparison indicates that initial stiffness, maximum base shear and acceleration at the performance point are conservative. This analysis method can be used for low-rise buildings and it is beneficial for engineers in doing seismic evaluation for low-rise buildings.