In Latin America there is an urgent need for housing; thus, during the last few years a relevant number of mid-height buildings (usually, up to five stories) with thin RC shear-walls have been constructed for low-cost dwellings in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Venezuela, and other countries located in seismic-prone regions. These walls are 10 cm thick and their reinforcement consists mainly of a single layer of welded wire mesh. This construction technology offers two main advantages: economy and rapidity of construction. These buildings do not fulfill the international seismic codes but some national regulations are less demanding, not preventing the use of thin bearing walls. These buildings might be vulnerable to earthquakes because of their low ductility, the insufficiency of the experimental information, the absence of observed damages and, in some cases, poor construction quality. This work describes the initial steps of a wider research aiming at providing reliable seismic design guidelines for thin-wall buildings; the initial objectives are analyzing the seismic performance of these buildings, proposing preliminary design criteria and identifying further research needs. This research focuses on buildings located in Peru, being representative of the situations in the other countries. The vulnerability is numerically evaluated by push-over and nonlinear time history analyses; the structural parameters are obtained from available testing information. The obtained results show that the seismic strength of the analyzed buildings is insufficient; however, minor changes in the structural design might improve significantly their seismic performance. Economical and easy-to-implement design recommendations are issued.

This paper initially describes aspects of the modeling of structures equipped with energy dissipators Shear Link Bozzo (SLB) and develops two iterative design procedures to select these devices. This methodology is applied to a precast 5-story reinforced concrete building. The SLB energy dissipation devices are initially stiff, but ductile with a range of yielding forces from 36 kN to 900 kN characterized by 52 + 52 standard devices. Moreover, these devices can be combined in parallel giving a very wide range of possibilities for selection and corresponding structural response. Therefore, to simplify its automatic selection, this article presents two procedures: (1) direct iteration and (2) inverse or fixed force iteration. Both procedures were implemented in an automatic application or “plugin” for the ETABS program that automates its selection for a specific structural system or architectural configuration of these elements. Using these devices, the energy introduced by an earthquake into the structure can be dissipated, protecting other structural elements that suffer damage. The SLB energy dissipation devices are affordable to get a significant performance improvement in the overall structural response. This work presents a five-story precast reinforced concrete building frame, called SLB Building, that provides 4 departments per level all with a diaphanous interior floor. The building is made up of 11 columns with a constant 40x40cm section and all its beams have hinges at the ends. This building was equipped with 120 small SLB devices showing its performance for the maximum earthquake of Peruvian seismic code without ductility reduction (R = 1) by means of nonlinear time history with ten seismic records compatible with the S1 soil spectrum. In this structure, all seismic energy dissipation was concentrated in these devices so there would be no structural damage. In addition, the levels of non-structural damage were controlled with initial stiffness of these devices since lateral displacements were reduced to levels below the Peruvian seismic code (or even immediate occupancy for devices greater than those provided in this example). At the same time, the levels of acceleration decrease in height to only 0.3g and the base shear coefficient is reduced from almost 1.2 to only 0.12-0.2 (this means an R factor between 6 and 10 without structural damage).