# Comparative Analysis of Target Displacements in RC Buildings for 2023 Turkiye Earthquakes
## 4 Comparison of Target Displacements  
The risk posed by earthquakes to human activities and the potential for significant loss of life due to structural damage provide compelling reasons to consider earthquakes in structural design. The earthquake-resistant design aims to create structures that can withstand a certain level of seismic activity without experiencing severe damage. In this context, target displacement limits are established for various performance levels of structures. Structural analyses were conducted to assess whether the Kahramanmaras earthquakes appropriately reflected the target displacement limit values in the affected buildings. The dominant building stock in the city centers in the earthquake region consists of RC structures, particularly mid-rise RC structures, which are widely used in the region. The majority of RC structures that suffered varying levels of damage or destruction were mid-rise RC structures. The majority of medium-rise reinforced concrete buildings in the earthquake zone consist of 4-8 stories. In order to represent these structures, a 5-story building without any irregularities was modeled. Material properties in accordance with current seismic design codes were used as design criteria. The structural model was chosen to be symmetrical in both directions. In selecting the model building features, structural characteristics commonly used in practice were taken into account. Structural analyses were carried out for an example RC structure, considering the highest PGA values measured in eleven different provinces in the earthquake region, both from earthquake pairs and the PGAs estimated for these provinces in the last two earthquake hazard maps used in Turkiye. The analyses were performed using Seismostat-2024 software [84]. In structural analyses, pushover analyses were conducted separately for each province. The RC building model is a 5-story structure with equal floor heights of 3 m. The building has the same span length in the X and Y directions, is symmetrical and each span is chosen as 4.50 m. The 2D and 3D models created for the sample RC structure and the applied loads are shown in Figure 9. RC columns were taken into account as square cross-sections in order not to create weak and strong directions for the structural model. Therefore, structural analyses were performed only in the X direction for all structural models. The RC building model selected as an example was chosen to represent mid-rise RC buildings in the earthquake region. Figure 8: Examples of structural damage commonly observed in RC structures and their schematic representations. Pushover analysis, a numerical analysis method, examines how much structures or structural elements will deform under a certain load and how they will behave under the effect of these loads. In this type of analysis, elastic and plastic behaviors are generally taken into account. Pushover analysis is commonly used in earthquake engineering. This method is applied to predict how a structure will behave during an earthquake. Pushover analysis evaluates how much the structure will deform when pushed by static loads (usually with ground motion simulation) and at what point it may be damaged. It is simpler and can be completed more quickly than more complex dynamic analyses. This method allows for the assessment of displacement, rotation, and damage points of the structure [85; 86; 87; 88; 89]. The flow chart of the pushover analysis procedure is given in Figure 11.  
Figure 10: The blueprint of the selected RC structural model. Figure 9: 2D and 3D numerical models of the sample RC structure. A target displacement value of 1.0 m was selected for all structural models. In the numerical analysis, the local soil class ZC soil class, which can be evaluated as the average soil class in Eurocode-8, was taken into account. Force-based plastic hinge frame elements (infrmFBPH) were chosen for the columns and beams in all structural models. These elements limit plasticity to a finite length and simulate force-based flexibility in extension.