EXPERIMENTAL AND ANALYTICAL PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT

The 1999 Chi-Chi earthquake revealed the poor performance of the RC school buildings in Taiwan. It also indicates an urgent need of seismic evaluation and retrofit for the remaining schools. In order to realize the behavior of a typical school building subjected to lateral load, a series of in-situ test for two existing 2-story RC school buildings was carried out. Three types of lateral loading patterns were subjected to three 2-story 2-classroom frame specimens respectively: monotonic static pushover, cyclic static pushover, and earthquake time history input. This present paper is devoted to the experimental program, test results and analytical assessment. Moreover, the responses to free vibration, forced vibration and mircotremor measurement were recorded in order to identify the dynamic behavior of frame specimens. These experiments provide reliable and efficient data of real interest for a clear understanding of the actual building behavior, especially the effects of the seismic performance of a school building subjected to cyclic lateral loading collocating with pseudo dynamic test (PDT). The advantage of integrating these data in the seismic evaluation is presented and discussed. Results of these tests are reported, analyzed and interpreted in this paper. Test results present that the effect of the decay of structural strength and stiffness induced by cyclic loading should be considered in seismic evaluation procedure properly