Lateral-load analysis and capacity design of a four-storey RC frame under GB 50011

Question

Can a complete reinforced concrete frame for a seismic site be designed, checked and drawn by hand, to the Chinese codes, in a way that someone else can follow line by line?

Approach

The No. 2 Office Building in Panzhihua City is a four-storey cast-in-place RC moment frame (seismic grade three) with spans of 7.2–6.6–7.2 m, 600 × 600 mm columns, C40 concrete and HRB400 bars. The design was carried out entirely by hand to GB 50009-2012, GB 50010-2010 and GB 50011-2010, for seismic intensity 7 (0.10 g), design group 1, site class II, and a basic wind pressure of 0.30 kN/m².

• Preliminary sizing from axial compression ratios, then beam and column line stiffness.
• Gravity loads by two-cycle moment distribution; wind and horizontal seismic action by the D-value method.
• Two-way slabs by yield-line design.
• Load combinations, then capacity design: strong column, weak beam; strong shear, weak bending.
• Beam and column reinforcement, and 18 A3 drawing sheets. Supervisor: He Weidong.

Validation

Inter-storey drifts were checked against the GB 50011 limit of 1/550; the largest elastic drift under earthquake is 1/1126 in the ground storey.

Three years later, the thesis became the validation case for ShellBench. Rebuilding it in OpenSeesPy, I logged 16 input inconsistencies and 21 doubtful printed values, each with a recorded decision. That audit is what taught me to trust a result only after it has been checked against something independent.

Results

A complete, documented design with drawings, released openly with a DOI.

What this does not show

• The analysis uses classical hand methods (moment distribution, D-value), not a full 3D model; ShellBench’s response-spectrum check is the later comparison.
• The printed thesis contains the inconsistencies listed in the ShellBench audit; the audit, not the original, is the corrected record.

Evidence

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