Horizontal loading test on light-weight reinforced concrete school building

Inelastic behavior of a school building was investigated under altemating horizontal forces. A building with a parallel two plane frame, 3 -stories, and 2 -bays was selected for the test. The horizontal forces were altemately applied on the second and top floors of the frame. The ultimate strength and the inelastic horizontal load-displacement curve of the frame were calculated and the experimental results were compared with them. The experimental observations and the discussions are summarized as follows: 1) When the relative horizontal displacement reached h/100 (h=story height) in the first story, the maximum horizontal load was observed. And a window pane was broken in the first story. 2) The concrete block wall, which tends to be neglected in the structural calculation, affects the strength and crack pattｅrns of the column with it. 3) The horizontal ultimate strength of a frame with weak-columns and strong-beams can be estimated by summing up the smaller of the values for either bending or shearing ultimate loads carrying capacity of a column. 4) The calculated inelastic curve based on Sugano's method fairly well agrees with the envelope of the horizontal load-displacement curves obtained from the tests