RCC Framed Buildings

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Overview

RCC shear walls help resist lateral forces and slow down structural damage during earthquakes, but their performance depends heavily on placement and design philosophy. In most buildings, architectural requirements push these walls into the core instead of the perimeter, increasing torsion and reducing effectiveness. Even when designed as per IS 1893, they still crack and deform because actual seismic forces are reduced by a factor of 4 to keep construction economical. They buy time, not immunity.

RCC Framed Building

Challenges in Conventional RCC Structures

Shear walls need dense reinforcement, which makes proper concrete flow almost impossible. Segregation, honeycombing, cold joints, and level issues become common and quietly weaken the wall long before an earthquake hits. Add torsion from poorly placed walls and reduced design forces due to the response reduction factor, and the gap between paper design and real performance becomes obvious. Even code-compliant walls often fail to control deformation during strong shaking because construction quality simply doesn’t match design assumptions. Traditional shear-wall-heavy systems also rely on cracking and permanent damage to absorb energy, making structural repairs unavoidable after a major event. The result is a brittle, damage-dependent structure that’s expensive to fix, slow to recover, and increasingly hard to justify for developers and engineers.

2g Approach

Imperial 2G Approach

Imperial’s 2G Seismic Resilient Structure addresses these issues by replacing the deformation-bearing role of shear walls with passive energy dissipation devices. The system is centered around Seismic Friction Brakes, which act as the main lateral force resisting mechanism. Instead of forcing the RCC structure to crack and absorb energy, these devices take the hit directly and dissipate it in a controlled and repeatable way. They restrict deformation far more effectively and eliminate the dependence on heavily reinforced, construction-sensitive concrete walls.

Installation is straightforward. Yield-restrained braces fit into the structure using insert plates and gusset plates, which makes integration simple in both new and retrofit projects. With the lateral resistance handled by friction-based devices, the quantum of RCC shear walls can be drastically reduced or removed entirely. This shifts the building from a damage-dependent system to a performance-based one, where the structural frame stays largely elastic even during severe shaking.