Displacement-based seismic design of open ground storey buildings

Open ground storey (OGS) buildings are characterized by the sudden reduction of stiffness in the ground storey with respect to the upper infilled storeys. During earthquakes, this vertical irregularity may result in accumulated damage in the ground storey members of OGS buildings without much damage in the upper storeys. Hence, the structural design of OGS buildings needs special attention. The present study suggests a modification of existing displacement-based design (DBD) procedure by proposing a new lateral load distribution. The increased demands of ground storey members of OGS buildings are estimated based on non-linear time history analysis results of four sets of bare and OGS frames having four to ten storey heights. The relationship between the increased demand and the relative stiffness of ground storey (with respect to upper storeys) is taken as the criterion for developing the expression for the design lateral load. It is also observed that under far-field earthquakes, there is a decrease in the ground storey drift of OGS frames as the height of the frame increases, whereas there is no such reduction when these frames are subjected to near-field earthquakes.