Seismic Behaviour Study of Primary Schools in Algarve and Huelva Cities. Case Study of Three Different Building Technologies

—A project named PERSISTAH (Projetos de Escolas Resilientes aos SISmos no Território do Algarve e de Huelva, in Portuguese ) is being developed. It aims to cooperatively assess the seismic vulnerability of primary schools of the Algarve (Portugal) and Huelva (Spain). Primary school buildings have been selected due to their low adult/child ratio and the fact that many of these buildings were constructed prior to the current seismic resistant codes. To determine the seismic behaviour of primary schools in both regions, this has been studied with building seismic performance analysis through the capacity-demand spectrum method. One of the main difficulties of the project has to do with the large amount of buildings to analyse. This paper is focused on obtaining and comparing the performance point of different types of buildings and different structural systems (reinforced concrete frames, unreinforced masonry walls and mixed). The goal is to be able to extrapolate the results from the buildings analyzed (type and structural system) to others where the information is not available. Different types and structural systems have been calculated and their seismic behaviours have been compared. The results show that the type and the structural system are outstanding for calculating the performance point and that an acceptable correlation can be inferred from similar types and structural systems. The comparison of the different structural systems for the same typology has shown that for the same shear force, the Reinforced Concrete (RC) frames buildings are able to get deformed significantly more than the Unreinforced Masonry (URM) walls.