Some Critical Problems in Seismic Design of High-Rise RC Building frame Systems

High-rise residential buildings these days tend to adopt a building frame system as primary earthquake resisting structural system for some architectural reasons. But there exist several ambiguities in designing such building frame systems according to current codes with regards to : the effective stiffness property of RC cracked section in static and dynamic analyses, analytical model to evaluate story drift ratio, and deformation compatibility requirements of frames. The comparative study for these issues by appling KBC 2005 to a typical building frame system shows that demands of member strength and story drift ratio can be different significantly depending on engineer's Interpretation and application of code requirements. And a building frame system can be noneconomical, compared with the dual system, because of higher demands on strength or ductility in both frames and shear walls.