THE EFFECT OF MEZZANINE HEIGHT VARIATION ON STRUCTURAL BEHAVIOR IN FRAMED REINFORCED CONCRETE WORKPLACE BUILDINGS

Turkey is located in a region with high seismic activity due to the intersection of many tectonic plates. Since severe earthquakes are encountered at certain periods, it is an inevitable necessity that the buildings to be constructed in Turkey and similar geographical regions should be designed to be earthquake resistant. In this study, a reinforced concrete frame structure with symmetrically designed geometry and structural elements is investigated. The structural elements and geometry of the structure are selected symmetrically and a structural system layout without torsional irregularities is obtained. Equivalent Earthquake Load method, one of the structural analysis methods, is used in the study. The equivalent earthquake load method can be called a simplified version of the mode coupling method. On the other hand, it is also important to investigate the earthquake behavior of reinforced concrete structures with mezzanine floors on the ground floor, which are commonly encountered in practice. The main objective of this study is to investigate the effect of a mezzanine floor in two directions on the earthquake characteristics of workplace type reinforced concrete structures. In this study, 3- storey reinforced concrete buildings with a symmetrically designed frame are investigated. Normal floor heights are 3 meters in all building types. The height of the ground floor is fixed to be 4 meters in all models. However, the mezzanine height varies as 3.0 meters for models with ground floor 7.0 meters, 2.5 meters for models with ground floor 6.5 meters, and 2.0 meters for models with ground floor 6.0 meters. A total of six different building models were created using different ground floor heights and mezzanine heights for the same mezzanine type. Analyses of the models of all building types were carried out in the Sap2000 program environment. In order to examine the structural behavior of the models, building periods, base shear forces, peak maximum displacement and soft story irregularity coefficients were compared.