Estimate of fundamental period of reinforced concrete buildings: code provisions vs. experimental measures in Victoria and Vancouver (BC, Canada)

The fundamental period of a group of reinforced concrete (RC) buildings located in the cities of Victoria and Vancouver (British Columbia, Canada) has been estimated using ambient vibration data. As result a preliminary height-dependent relationship has been derived for a fully elastic condition. The regression returns very similar values respect to those obtained in other countries using the system identification technique based on ambient vibrations. As expected, the results show that building periods estimated based on simple equations provided by earthquake design codes in Europe (EC8) and North America (UBC97 and NBCC-2005) are significantly greater than the periods computed using ambient vibration records on the monitored buildings