As earthquakes have increased in Korea recently, people are paying attention to the seismic performance of buildings built in the past. Many school buildings in Korea were built based on standard drawings before the seismic design was applied. However, since school buildings are often designated as emergency evacuation facilities in case of disasters such as earthquakes, seismic evaluation and retrofit must be done quickly. This study investigated the failure modes among structural components (beams, columns, and joints), focusing on 1980s standard drawings for school buildings. The effects of column axial force, partial masonry infills, and different material strengths for concrete and rebar were considered for detailed evaluation. As a result, most of the joints were found to be the weakest among structural components. Column axial forces tended to make the joints more vulnerable, and partial masonry infills increased the possibility of joint failure and shear failure in columns.

Most school buildings consist of reinforced concrete (RC) moment frames with masonry infills. The longitudinal direction frames of those school buildings are relatively weak due to the short-column effects caused by the partial masonry infills and need to be evaluated carefully. In ‘Manual for Seismic Performance Evaluation and Retrofit of School Facilities’ published in 2018, response modification factor of 2.5 is applied to non-seismic RC moment frames with partial masonry infills, but sufficient verification of the factor has not been reported yet. Therefore, this study conducted seismic performance evaluation of planar RC moment frames with partial masonry infills in accordance with both linear analysis and nonlinear static analysis procedures presented in the manual. The evaluation results from the different procedures are compared in terms of assessed performance levels and number of members not meeting target performance objectives. Finally, appropriate response modification factors are proposed with respect to a shear-controlled column ratio.

The seismic performance of school buildings has been a matter of common interest socially and academically. The structural system of the school buildings is representative of the domestic low-rise reinforced concrete moment resisting frames, which apply extensively infills in their masonry walls. The masonry infilled walls are divided into full masonry infill in the transverse direction and partial masonry infill in the longitudinal direction. The masonry infilled walls are usually not included in structural analysis during the design process, but affect significantly the seismic performance because they behave with surrounding frames simultaneously during earthquakes. Many researchers have studied the effect of the masonry infilled walls, but several issues have been missed such as the increase of asymmetry by adding the full masonry infill, the size of the mean strength of the full masonry infill, and short column effect by the partial masonry infill. The issues were analytically investigated and the results showed that they should be checked at least by nonlinear pushover analysis in the seismic performance evaluation process. The results also confirm the weakness of the guideline of Korean Educational Development Institute where the seismic performance is basically assessed without structural analysis.