Impact of Flood on Buildings

Abstract

This project focuses on both the incorporation of flood loads during the design stage and the assessment of flood vulnerability of reinforced concrete buildings. Vulnerability is expressed as a fraction of ground floor height and assumes that flood water at most immerse the building up to ground floor level. The importance of the outcome arises from the need of a strengthening solution to avoid failure of new or existing structures during floods. To compute the critical effect, the flood was assumed to act along the 18m side and an intermediate 2D frame along 9m side was considered for the study. Three frame models were used, a) bare frame model, without any partition walls, b) frame with light weight partition wall; c) frame with structural infill wall. The infill walls were modeled as a diagonal strut having width 230mm, very low moment of inertia, modulus of elasticity 13800 N/mm2 and Poisson ratio 0.25. The weight of light weight partition walls were considered negligible. Hence, frame models for both bare frame and frame with light weight partition walls were similar but the difference will come in to the picture while applying flood load. The model is analysed in SAP 2000 Software. From the analysis it can be concluded that bare frame is less vulnerable and frame with light weight partition wall result as the most vulnerable, storey drift for the frame with structural infill walls is very low. Soft storied buildings are less vulnerable compared to ordinary buildings and this depends on the free movement of water in between the columns.