THE ROLE OF STRUCTURAL MODELING ON THE SEISMIC ASSESSMENT OF EXISTING RC BUILDINGS ACCORDING TO EUROCODE 8

ABSTRACT In these years, due to the construction peak in the past decades and to the unfavorable economic situation, the choice to rehabilitate, restore and retrofit existing buildings is preferred to their reconstruction whenever it is possible. The seismic assessment of existing buildings, therefore, is an essential issue of the current Technical Codes. This work is focused on the evaluation of the seismic performance of existing RC buildings, and more precisely, with the role of their modeling on such evaluation. The work is made on a case-study, that is a real, RC hospital building. An accurate knowledge of the building has been achieved, as a result of a collaboration between the University of Florence and the Regional Government. All the main information about material, soil, design and architectural features have been collected. Two different analytical procedures provided by the Eurocode 8, integrated to the Italian Technical Code (NTC 2008) have been applied and compared. The analysis has shown the scatter in seismic assessment referring to the possible modeling choices.