The seismic behavior of a representative medium-rise building of Mexico City has been evaluated using the capacity spectrum method. This method is widely used nowadays in the seismic assessment of buildings, since it allows obtaining fragility curves which permit evaluating the ability of a building to resist earthquakes.A real full-height multi-story model is proposed to test the capabilities of the algorithm herein exhibited. The model is outlined through structural drawings; sized and structured following the building code regulations for masonry structures in Mexico City. Computational requirements for the analysis of large structures are indicated, in addition to the improvements to a non-linear computing code for a better performance in terms of memory management and execution times. Finally, a comparison between obtained results and the building code regulation is carried out,highlighting differences in the obtained results. The need to handle meshes with high amount of finite elements pushed us to develop a new layered finite element (FE), that can reproduce the non-linear behavior of its constituent materials when there are out-of-plane stresses without having to introduce additional degrees of freedom. The proposed FE has been compared with standard FE, presenting different kinematics, and excellent results have been obtained. This work emerges as the need to combine and improve existing technologies in the field of finite element analysis. One of such technologies is the numerical simulation of the behaviour of composite materials. That is why it has also been necessary to develop a computing program capable of reading both finite element meshes and patterns of fibers represented with convex polygons, and as a result of areas intersections between polygons returns volumetric participation of fiber and matrix of constituents materials for each layer, in addition had to return the fiber orientation with respect to the local axis of the finite element.

Peer Reviewed