Floor Acceleration Demands in a Twelve-Storey RC Shear Wall Building

The seismic response of acceleration-sensitive non-structural components in buildings has attracted the attention of a significant number of researchers over the past decade. This paper provides the results which improve the state-of-knowledge of the influences that higher vibration modes of structures and nonlinearity of non-structural components have on floor acceleration demands. In order to study these influences, a response-history analysis of a code-designed twelve-storey reinforced concrete building consisting of uncoupled ductile cantilever shear walls was conducted. The obtained absolute floor accelerations were used as a seismic input for linear elastic and nonlinear non-structural components represented by simple single-degree-of-freedom systems, and the main observations and findings related to the studied influences along the building height are presented and discussed. Additionally, the accuracy of the method for the direct determination of peak floor accelerations and floor response (acceleration) spectra recently co-developed by the first author was once again investigated and validated. A brief summary of the method is provided in the paper, along with the main steps in its application. Being relatively simple and sufficiently accurate, the method (in its simplified form) has been recently incorporated into the draft of the new generation of Eurocode 8.