Sunitha Palissery

International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad | IIIT · Earthquake Engineering Research Centre (EERC)

Cooling towers are commonly used in commercial, industrial, and hospital buildings for Heating, Ventilating, and Air Conditioning requirements. In general, they are mounted on roof of buildings and designed as Non-Structural Elements (NSE). Further, for minimum transfer of vibrations during strong earthquake shaking to the supporting buildings, vib...

In the aftermath of earthquakes, hospital buildings are expected to remain occupiable to treat the injured. For the purpose, firstly, an appropriate structural system that ensures no or limited structural damage should be provided in such buildings; wall-frames are the recommended structural systems in hospital buildings. Secondly, it is also essen...

In urban reinforced concrete buildings, ground storeys are usually left open to facilitate parking. The earlier and common practice of designing frame members in the open storeys using a scale factor increases member sizes and thereby improves its stiffness and strength. But, this improvement needs to be seen relative to the stiffness and strength...

Wall-Frames, the recommended structural system for lifeline buildings is expected to have satisfactory and desirable seismic performance, especially if located in high seismic regions. In this work, fiber modeling approach is used to model inelasticity in walls and moment frames in a 6 storey-3-bay 2D wall-frame system. Displacement-controlled nonl...

This study considers simple acceleration sensitive Non-structural elements (NSEs) with fundamental period TS ≤ 0.07seconds, modelled as a rigid cantilever with lumped mass at the top (stick model). Numerical modelling of building and NSE together (complete model) and nonlinear time history analyses using 11 natural ground motions are performed in c...

Wall-Frames, the recommended structural system for lifeline buildings is expected to have satisfactory and desirable seismic performance, especially if located in high seismic regions. In this work, fiber modeling approach is used to model inelasticity in walls and moment frames in a 6 storey-3-bay 2D wall-frame system. Displacement-controlled nonl...

Earthquake Resistant Design Philosophy seeks (a) no damage, (b) no significant structural damage, and (c) significant structural damage but no collapse of normal buildings, under minor, moderate and severe levels of earthquake shaking, respectively. A procedure is proposed for seismic design of low-rise reinforced concrete special moment frame buil...

A simple approach is presented to derive limiting strain-based bilinear overstrength moment-curvature response curves of reinforced concrete sections. These curves are obtained by simple hand calculations proposed in the paper. Implications of use of these idealized curves are examined on estimating seismic behaviour of RC frame buildings by nonlin...

Capacity design precludes brittle actions thereby maximising energy dissipation capacity of moment resisting frame buildings through flexural yielding in beams before possible yielding in columns during strong earthquake shaking. The flexural strength of columns is required to be more than that of beams framing into it. Seismic design codes stipula...

Nonlinear static pushover analysis is used to assess seismic behaviour of structures reasonably well. Commercial structural analysis softwares currently available to perform pushover analysis (PoA) require definition of inelastic regions as idealised bilinear load-deformation response curves. Reinforced concrete (RC) structural walls in mid-rise bu...

Flexibility of column bases in RC moment resisting frame buildings alters seismic demands imposed in frame members. This paper examines analytically three such column base restraint conditions based on actual site conditions, and understands the implications of such considerations on imposed seismic demands, especially inter-storey drift demands an...

A quantitative approach is required to ensure desired global ductile behaviour with at least a guaranteed level of deformation capacity of buildings. This paper quantifies the required column-to-beam strength ratio, and insufficiency of the current code prescribed values of strength ratio to achieve a ductile mechanism. Column-to-beam strength rati...