Seismic Analysis of RCC Water Tanks under Near-Fault Condition

Reinforced concrete water tank plays a important role in providing sustainable water supply to the our community. We use water supply for our daily basic needs, industrial needs, agriculture, firefighting purposes etc. Due to its importance factor, water tank’s structural integrity was important during an critical event of time. Seismic design of reinforced concrete water tanks is a critical aspect of ensuring the safety and functionality of these structures during seismic activities. The importance of seismic design for reinforced concrete water tanks extends beyond just safeguarding the tanks themselves. These tanks often provide a critical water supply during post-earthquake recovery and emergency response operations. Therefore, ensuring their structural integrity helps to maintain an essential resource for drinking, sanitation, and firefighting purposes when it is most needed. Earthquake creates large number of lateral forces. The amount of damage which exerts on the building depends on both the seismic activity and the building’s property. Water tanks has a huge amount of mass accumulated on the single point at a certain height which makes them vulnerable to some kinds on critical events. Capacity based design provided to be useful for designing a building for withstanding earthquake. But we need to know how to be building reacts to a certain event before we design the water tank according to it. Performance-based design philosophy plays a vital role in predicting the performance level associated with several levels of hazardous earthquake events. For this purpose, the building needs to be designed beyond the elastic limit of the member. The analysis procedure was broadly classified into linear and nonlinear methods of analysis, in which linear is only used in case the building won’t reach the collapse load. But during an earthquake, the structural loading will reach the collapse load, and the material stresses will be above yield stresses. So the material and geometrical properties of the building need to be considered heterogeneous and non-linear. It is focused on behavior of RC water tank under near fault excitation condition. Two water tank model was used for this thesis where one can hold up to 500m3 of water and other is up to 1370m3 of water. The finite element modelling and numerical analysis is done using ABAQUS software.