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Structural Assessment of a School Building in Sankhu, Nepal Damaged Due to Torsional Response During the 2015 Gorkha Earthquake

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Dynamics of Civil Structures, Volume 2

Abstract

This paper discusses the structural assessment of a red-tagged four-story school building in Sankhu, Nepal. The building had a masonry-infilled reinforced concrete frame which was severely damaged during the 2015 Gorkha Earthquake. The concentration of damage in the west end of the first story indicates that the frame exhibited torsional response to the ground excitation. The authors visited the structure 2 months after the earthquake, collected LiDAR scans, and recorded the ambient vibrations of the damaged structure. The LiDAR data has been used to create a three-dimensional point cloud of the building which has allowed the identification of the locations and geometry of the major cracks but also the measurement of the permanent deformations of the building. The structure was also instrumented with four unidirectional accelerometers on every floor; two at opposite corners, to capture the translational and torsional motion. The translational and torsional modes have been identified with an operational modal analysis method and have been used to validate a finite element model of the structure. The comparison indicates that the model can capture the modal properties of the structure utilizing the strut modeling approach for the infill panels.

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Acknowledgements

The researchers from the University at Buffalo and Oregon State University were supported by NSF Awards #1545595 and #1545632, respectively. The authors would also like to acknowledge the support of National Society of Earthquake Technology (NSET) in Nepal, through the support of Ramesh Guragain and Dev Kumar Maharjan. The collaboration of other researchers including Patrick Burns, Matt Gillins, Michael Olsen, Giuseppe Brando, Davide Rapone, Enrico Spacone, Rajendra Soti, Humberto Varum, António Arêde, Nelson Vila-Pouca, André Furtado, João Oliveira, Hugo Rodrigues, Marco Faggella and Rosario Gigliotti during the reconnaissance trip and in the collection of data is greatly appreciated as well. However, the opinions expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the sponsor or the collaborators.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, USA

    Supratik Bose & Andreas Stavridis

  2. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA

    Amin Nozari & Moaveni Babak

  3. Department of Civil Engineering, University of Nebraska Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, USA

    Mohammad Ebrahim Mohammadi & Richard Wood

  4. Department of Civil and Construction Engineering, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA

    Dan Gillins & Andre Barbosa

Authors
  1. Supratik Bose
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  2. Amin Nozari
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  3. Mohammad Ebrahim Mohammadi
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  4. Andreas Stavridis
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  5. Moaveni Babak
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  6. Richard Wood
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  7. Dan Gillins
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  8. Andre Barbosa
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Andreas Stavridis .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept of Civil & Envt Engg, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA

    Shamim Pakzad

  2. University of South Carolina, Columbia, USA

    Caicedo Juan

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© 2016 The Society for Experimental Mechanics, Inc.

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Bose, S. et al. (2016). Structural Assessment of a School Building in Sankhu, Nepal Damaged Due to Torsional Response During the 2015 Gorkha Earthquake. In: Pakzad, S., Juan, C. (eds) Dynamics of Civil Structures, Volume 2. Conference Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Mechanics Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29751-4_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29751-4_5

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-29750-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-29751-4

  • eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)

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