Assessment of school building model under recommended earthquake loading for Peninsular Malaysia

Abstract

This paper is written to study how a structural (in this study, a school building is taken as a model) in Malaysia resist against earthquake of which the earthquake magnitude has been scale down according to Malaysian scale. The Malaysian Peak Ground Acceleration (PGA) is 30 gal or 0.03 g. Through Pushover Analysis (POA) which is tested to know its maximum capacity of the building, the maximum capacity of the school building through horizontal axis, Ux is 5.286 mm and through vertical axis, Uz is 0.0630 mm. Through modification of ground motion from PEER to suit the Malaysian PGA, for V/H < 1, the maximum displacement Ux is 0.000386 mm while Uz is 0.00016 mm. For V/H > 1, the maximum displacement Ux = 0.000386 mm while Uz is 0.000016 mm. This concludes that the school building model is able to resist the Malaysia earthquake as the maximum displacement of horizontal Ux and vertical displacement Uz does not exceed the collapse limit although no earthquake design is taken as a consideration during the design. This also concludes that vertical ground motion need not be consider when designing structural in Malaysia because the V/H < 1 and V/H > 1 shows no differences in maximum displacement.