Soft-story deficiency due to open ground story in properly designed reinforced concrete buildings

Abstract

The possible deficiencies that may be caused by the infill walls have been revealed in the literature. The absence of infill walls at the ground story that is termed as the open ground story has generally been related to a soft story deficiency. However, the scale of an accumulation of seismic demands at the ground story due to the absence of infill walls at that particular level should depend on some other parameters regarding the characteristics of infill wall, structural system and even ground motion. The seismic code-compliant reinforced concrete buildings are considered in this study. The soft-story problem due to the open ground story in these types of buildings was considered with a special emphasis on the varying amounts of shear walls. Five-time history records were selected to be used in nonlinear time history analyses of three different building models. The results show that there may be a risk for the soft story formation even in the case of properly designed buildings which may be eliminated by a certain amount of shear walls.