Description:
<jats:p>There is a common way to enhance the collapse safety of residential houses using extra tilted poles supporting poor structures from the outside before and/or after earthquakes in seismic regions, especially in rural areas. But, almost all of these supporting measures are still weak and lack of scientific design and evaluation. This study takes a poorly designed two-bay and three-story RC frame building as an object to explore the effect of this kind of support measures on structural seismic resistance by comparing with a standard-designed RC frame structure model as a contrastive case. The results obtained by performance-based methods indicate that extra poles can improve the seismic collapse safety and reduce structural seismic damage of the poorly designed structure (PDS) effectively. The median collapse capacity parameter <jats:italic>θ</jats:italic> increases from 1.31 g to the range of 1.92∼2.39 g, and <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" id="M1"><mml:mrow><mml:msub><mml:mrow><mml:mi>S</mml:mi></mml:mrow><mml:mrow><mml:mtext>a</mml:mtext></mml:mrow></mml:msub><mml:mfenced open="(" close=")" separators="|"><mml:mrow><mml:msub><mml:mrow><mml:mi>T</mml:mi></mml:mrow><mml:mrow><mml:mn>1</mml:mn></mml:mrow></mml:msub><mml:mo>;</mml:mo><mml:mn>10</mml:mn><mml:mo>%</mml:mo></mml:mrow></mml:mfenced></mml:mrow></mml:math> (spectral acceleration at the first-mode period which causes 10% probability of structural collapse) also increases from 0.57 g to the range of 0.75∼1.08 g. Study of dynamic structural damage shows a great damage reduction of PDS under seismic loads, especially <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" id="M2"><mml:mrow><mml:msub><mml:mrow><mml:mi>S</mml:mi></mml:mrow><mml:mrow><mml:mtext>a</mml:mtext></mml:mrow></mml:msub><mml:mfenced open="(" close=")" separators="|"><mml:mrow><mml:msub><mml:mrow><mml:mi>T</mml:mi></mml:mrow><mml:mrow><mml:mn>1</mml:mn></mml:mrow></mml:msub></mml:mrow></mml:mfenced></mml:mrow></mml:math> = 0.2 g. This study proves that this simple measure can improve the seismic resistance of PDS into an acceptable level by taking our suggested practical and efficient supporting schemes.</jats:p>