Buildings are the backbone of the world\'s infrastructure. Without this backbone, civilization doesn\'t exist. The challenge to improve the seismic performance of existing reinforce concrete buildings in Armenia is aimed in this study.
The seismic response analysis has been done in this study for the target PRC residential building, located in Armenia. This is a typical construction solution in Armenia which has very low seismic capacity. When the Spitak earthquake occurred in 1988, all of this type of buildings collapsed or severely damaged. Moreover still now their number is continuing to be larger in the capital city Yerevan without any rehabilitation technic.
Rehabilitation of the building has been offered to realize the criteria by taking seismic isolation technology into consideration. The numerical simulation for the above building includes non-linear analyses, based on the non- linear model for structural members, which have been made using Stera 3D software. Time history response analysis has been done with and without seismic isolation. From the result of those analyses, it has been proved that the response of seismically isolated building is as follows: the good seismic effect was obtained through the response analysis in the most calculation cases. However in case of Armenia, as the upper structure’s capacity for the target PRC residential building is low, in order to get the good seismic effect it was obtained that the optimum design for seismic isolation layer should be done from the non-linear analysis.
As a conclusion, in this paper a proposal design for the base isolated layer has been made based on the numerical results, Armenian building characteristics and Japanese seismic isolation technology.