The Seismic Performance And Optimum Design Of RC Structures For The Primary And Middle School Buildings

School is a public place for its education activities of students and it is very important to ensure the school buildings do not collapse in the severe earthquake and become emergency shelters in hazard. Many different types of school buildings were severely damaged or collapsed during the May 12,2008 Great Wenchuan Earthquake. It is necessary to do research on seismic performance evaluation and optimum design of the primary and middle school buildings.First, this paper introduces several kinds of typical school building structures: brick-wood structure, masonry structure and frame structure, and their major damage forms and reasons that caused in 2008 Great Wenchuan Earthquake are summarized. Second, the finite element analysis software SAP2000 is used to analyze typical single span structure with response spectrum analysis, pushover analysis and elasto-plastic time history analysis to evaluate its seismic performance. Third, a comparison research on different school structure forms is carried out:double span frame structure, structure with buckling restrained braces or RC braces, structure with short-pier shear wall, structure with dampers and structure with base isolation technology. And also considering both the seismic performance and cost, the evaluation model of the structure performance and cost is established to compare different structures proposed above to get the new design of school buildings with high performance and low cost. It is concluded that the single span structure with isolation technology is the best structural form and the second one is short-pier shear wall structure. Finally, by using the sequential quadratic programming algorithm, the integrated optimum design of a RC single span school structures with buckling restrained braces subjected to El- Centro(1940) ground motion is conducted, in which the optimum objective is to minimize the maximum story drift and member volume of structure, as well as the structural member sizes and the parameters of buckling restrained braces are modified simultaneously.