Seismic Evaluation and Retrofitting of Existing Hospital Building in the Sudan

Abstract

Sudan is not free from earthquakes. It has experienced many earthquakes during the recent history, and the previous studies on this field demonstrated this argument. This paper focuses on the study of seismic performance of existing hospital buildings in Sudan. The paper focused on studying design of reinforced concrete columns of a hospital building considering two load cases; case one is the design load including combinations of dead, live and wind loads and case two includes dead, live and seismic loads. The building was designed according to the Regulation of Egyptian Society for Earthquake Engineering (ESEE), using the linear static method (equivalent static method). The analysis and design were performed using the SAP2000 version 14 software package. The design results obtained from the two cases of loading were compared observing that the design based on case one was unsafe to withstand the additional load came from earthquake, because the cross sections and area of steel for the most of building columns are under the required values that needed to resist the loads of case two. If the building is constructed according to the design using the loadings of case one, this situation needs remedy. This paper suggested two solutions for this problem based on strengthening the weak columns by inserting reinforced concrete shear walls in the direction of y axis affected by seismic load. Solution one suggests shear walls of length 2.5 m with different wall thicknesses (15 cm, 20 cm, 25 cm and 30 cm), whereas solution two suggests shear walls of length 4.5 m and 15 cm width. It was found that solution one solved the problem partially because some columns were still unsafe, but solution two solved the problem completely and all columns were safe.