Design and preliminary design evaluation of RC MRF buildings to the next generation of Eurocodes

The RINTC (Rischio Implicito delle strutture progettate secondo le NTC, Implicit Risk of structures designed according to NTC) research project, funded by the Italian Department of Civil Protection, started in 2015 and initially focused on seismic risk assessment of new structures designed according to the current Italian design codes (NTC 2008, later updated to NTC 2018). In 2019-2021, the project focused on low-code and pre-code buildings, thus investigating the increase of seismic safety due to the updating of code provisions. In 2022-2023, the project is focused on the assessment of seismic safety of retrofitted pre-code and low-code buildings, as well as on the design of new buildings according to the next generation of Eurocodes. This work is focused on the second topic. This work is a summary and a critical discussion of the preliminary results obtained for bare RC MRF residential buildings. More specifically, the design of the buildings is presented and discussed, by focusing on the new or updated provisions of the Eurocodes that mostly influenced design choices. Also, the most critical of difficult aspects related to new or updated code provisions applications are analyzed. The results of the design process are presented. Then, current-Eurocode-compliant and next-generation-Eurocode-compliant buildings are compared from two points of view: quantities of structural materials necessary for the realization of buildings – which is partially related to realization costs – and expected lateral response with a nonlinear static assessment of the bare structures.