Recently, an unprecedented emerging infectious disease has rapidly spread, causing a global shortage of wards. Although various temporary beds have appeared, the supply of wards specializing in infectious diseases is required. Negative pressure isolation wards should maintain their function even after an earthquake. However, the current seismic design standards do not guarantee the negative pressure isolation wards’ operational (OP) performance level. For this reason, some are not included in the design target even though they are non-structural elements that require seismic design. Also, the details of non-structural elements are usually determined during the construction phase. It is often necessary to complete the stability review and reinforcement design for non-structural elements within a short period. Against this background, enhanced performance objectives were set to guarantee the OP non-structural performance level, and a computerized tool was developed to quickly perform the seismic design of non-structural elements in the negative pressure isolation wards. This study created a spreadsheet-based computer tool that reflects the components, installation spacing, and design procedures of non-structural elements. Seismic performance review and design of the example non-structural elements were conducted using the computerized tool. The strength of some components was not sufficient, and it was reinforced. As a result, the time and effort required for strength evaluation, displacement evaluation, and reinforcement design were reduced through computerized tools.

Most commercial buildings among existing RC buildings in Korea have a multi-story wall-frame structure where RC shear wall is commonly used as its core at stairways or elevators. The members of the existing middle and low-rise wall-frame buildings are likely arranged in ordinary details considering building occupancy, and the importance and difficulty of member design. This is because there are few limitations, considerations, and financial burdens on the code for designing members with ordinary details. Compared with the intermediate or unique details, the ductility and overstrength are insufficient. Furthermore, the behavior of the member can be shear-dominated. Since shear failure in vertical members can cause a collapse of the entire structure, nonlinear characteristics such as shear strength and stiffness deterioration should be adequately reflected in the analysis model. With this background, an 8-story RC wall-frame building was designed as a building frame system with ordinary shear walls, and the effect of reflecting the shear failure mode of columns and walls on the collapse mechanism was investigated. As a result, the shear failure mode effect on the collapse mechanism was evident in walls, not columns. Consequently, it is recommended that the shear behavior characteristics of walls are explicitly considered in the analysis of wall-frame buildings with ordinary details.

2016 Gyeongju and 2017 Pohang earthquakes led Koreans to acknowledge that the Korean peninsula is not an earthquake-free zone anymore. Among various buildings crucial to after-shock recovery, general hospital buildings, especially existing old ones, are very significant so seismic retrofitting of those must be an important issue. Self-centering energy dissipative(SCED) brace is one of retrofitting methods, which consists of tendon with restoring force and friction device capable of dissipating seismic energy. The strength of the SCED brace is that the tendon forces a structure to go back to the original position, which means residual drift can be negligible. The residual drift is a very important parameter to determine usableness of general hospitals after shock. To the contrary, buckling-restrained braces(BRB) are also a very effective way to retrofit because they can resist both compressive and tensile, but residual drift may exist when the steel core yields. On this background, the seismic retrofitting effect of general hospitals reinforced with SCED braces was investigated and compared to that of the BRD in this study. As a result, although the floor acceleration cannot be reduced, the story drift and residual drift, and the shear demand of walls significantly decreased. Consequently, seismic retrofitting by SCED braces are very effective for domestic low-rise general hospitals.

The main function of the general hospital building is to provide medical facilities and service. However, damage to the non-structural elements such as architectural, medical, mechanical and other components will interrupt those functions after the earthquake. Especially, it is considered that, damage to the non-structural elements is a serious event because it is directly associated with the lives of patients. Therefore, this study evaluated whether the certain non-structural elements of general hospital building has the seismic performance to provide hospital medical services after the earthquake. The evaluation is conducted by selecting the non-structural elements used in general hospital which are sensitive to acceleration, such as cooling towers, air handler, MRI and CT. As a result, the non-structural elements located on the upper floor without suitable support method did not meet the performance objective. Therefore, adequate anchorage against the seismic event is required for such non-structural elements that are acceleration-sensitives.

One of engineered woods, glued laminated timber (GLT), can provide a constant level of performance and desired strength even if the quality of wood is low. Due to this fact, there is a growing interest in GLT using domestic species and related research has been carried out continuously. In addition, GLT is popularly being applied to the long-span or high-rise structures overseas. However, KBC 2016 does not allow the engineered woods to be used for middle and high-rise buildings by limiting height. Therefore, a proper design procedure and rationale should be clearly presented by the help of performance-based seismic design. With this background, the goal of this study is to establish a specific procedure for design of a 9-story building with RC shear walls and GLT frames according to the performance-based design of KBC 2016. The performance objectives were set according to KBC and the acceptance criteria for each goal were defined. The RC shear walls and GLT frames were designed by concrete and wood structure requirements, respectively. Analytical models were developed to reflect their nonlinear features, and both nonlinear static and dynamic analyses were conducted. Performance evaluation results showed that the shear walls have insufficient shear strength, so they were re-designed. Consequently, it has been confirmed that GLT frames can be applied to a 9-story office building with the assistance of RC shear walls and performance-based seismic design.

Pohang earthquake occurred on November 15, 2017, with a magnitude of 5.4. The damage of the structure caused by the Pohang earthquake was the most significant in 4-story piloti-type buildings, where the damage patterns were different according to the location of columns and walls at the first story. One　building with a staircase at a corner shows shear failure at columns, and Another building with a staircase in the middle shows no failure or shear failure at staircase walls. Therefore, two different piloti-type buildings were selected; one has a staircase at a corner and another has in the middle, and the seismic behavior of the buildings were examined by nonlinear dynamic analysis applying a ground motion measured at Pohang. Analytical model well simulated the actual behavior of the piloti-type buildings during the earthquake. Analysis results showed that walls have an insufficient shear strength wherever the location of the staircase is and columns with insufficient transverse reinforcement could be failed when the staircase is located at a corner. Conclusively, structural engineers should design columns and walls in piloti-type buildings to possess sufficient capacity according to the location of staircase.

The building which are essential for disaster recovery is classified as a special seismic use group. Especially, achievement of seismic performance is very important for the hospital, so the hospital should be able to maintain its function during and right after an earthquake without significant damage on both structural and non-structural elements. Therefore, this study aimed at checking the seismic performance of a hospital building, but which was limited to structural elements. For the goal, a plan with a configuration of general hospitals in Korea was selected and designed by two different seismic-force-resisting systems. In analytical modeling, the shear behavior of the wall was represented by three inelastic properties as well as elastic. Nonlinear dynamic analyses were conducted to evaluate the performance of structural members. The result showed that the performance of shear walls in the hospital buildings was not satisfied regardless of the seismic-force-resisting systems, while the demands on the beams and columns did not exceed the capacities. This is the result of only considering the shear of the wall as the force-controlled action. When the shear of the wall was modeled as inelastic, the walls were yielded in shear, and as the result, the demands for frames were increased. However, the increase did not exceed the capacities of the frames members. Consequently, since the performance of walls is significant to determine the seismic performance of a hospital building, it will be essential to establish a definite method of modeling shear behavior of walls and judging their performance.

The need for eco-friendly building materials such as engineered wood has increased to reduce carbon emissions. Although the range and height of engineered wood buildings are gradually increasing in North America and Europe, engineered wood is mainly used for low-rise residential buildings in Korea. In order to reduce carbon emissions more, therefore, it needs to expand the use of engineered wood by applying it to various buildings with different uses or more stories. With this background, the aim of this study is to investigate the applicability of engineered wood for 9-story office buildings. Since a 9-story building with engineered wood only is not allowed in KBC, an example building has RC ordinary shear walls as the lateral force resisting system while engineered wood is only used for gravity load resisting moment frames. Another example building is also used for comparison where both lateral and gravity load resisting systems are designed by RC. The applicability of engineered wood is investigated by comparing the seismic performance and the amount of carbon emission of both buildings. The result shows that the seismic performance of both buildings was not significantly different while the amount of carbon emission of the engineered wood building was much less then the RC building. Based on this result, engineered wood is sufficiently applicable to 9-story office buildings even though it still needs to pay attention to the shear design of reinforce concrete walls.

The risk-based assessment, also called time-based assessment of structure is usually performed to provide seismic risk evaluation of a target structure for its entire life-cycle, e.g. 50 years. The prediction of collapse probability is the estimator in the risk-based assessment. While the risk-based assessment is the key in the performance-based earthquake engineering, its application is very limited because this evaluation method is very expensive in terms of simulation and computational efforts. So the evaluation database for many archetype structures usually serve as representative of the specific system. However, there is no such an assessment performed for building stocks in Korea. Consequently, the performance objective of current building code, KBC is not clear at least in a quantitative way. This shortcoming gives an unresolved issue to insurance industry, socio-economic impact, seismic safety policy in national and local governments. In this study, we evaluate the comprehensive seismic performance of an low-rise residential buildings with discontinuous structural walls, so called piloti-type structure which is commonly found in low-rise domestic building stocks. The collapse probability is obtained using the risk integral of a conditioned collapse capacity function and regression of current hazard curve. Based on this approach it is expected to provide a robust tool to seismic safety policy as well as seismic risk analysis such as Probable Maximum Loss (PML) commonly used in the insurance industry.

Piloti-type building is one of typical vertical atypical buildings. These buildings can fail by weak-story or flexible-story mechanism on the first story. They should be designed by taking into account the special seismic load, but those less than six stories are not required to confirm the seismic performance from structural engineers in Korea. For this reason, small-size pilloti-type RC buildings need to be checked for seismic performance. Based on this background, this study performed nonlinear dynamic analysis using the PERFORM-3D for small-size pilloti-type RC buildings and assessed their seismic performance. Examples are two through four story buildings with and without walls in the first story. The walls and columns in the first story satisfied the target performance in the basic of flexural behavior due to quite a large size and reinforcement. However, wall shear demands exceed shear strength in some buildings. When designed for KBC2009, wall shear strength exceed shear demand in some buildings, but still does not in others. Consequently, wall shear must be carefully checked in both existing and new small-size pilloti-type RC buildings.

Small-size buildings are not designed by professional structural engineers in Korea. Therefore, their seismic performance can not be exactly estimated because their member sizes and reinforcement may be over- or under-designed. A prescriptive design criteria for the small-size buildings exists, but it also provides over-designed structural members since structural analysis is not incorporated, so it is necessary to revise the prescriptive criteria. The goal of this study was to provide an information for the revision, which is seismic performance and capability of small-size reinforced concrete moment frame buildings. For the study, the state of existing small-size reinforce-concrete buildings such as member size and reinforcement was identified by investigating their structural drawings. Then, over-strength, ductility and response modification factor of the small-size reinforced concrete moment frame buildings were estimated by analytical approach along with seismic performance check. The result showed that they possess moderate over-strength and ductility, and may use slightly increased response modification factor.