Keywords: reinforced concrete buildings, earthquake loading, nonlinear dynamic analysis, seismic assessment, partitioned modelling, parallel processing.

This paper proposes a new approach for the seismic assessment of reinforced concrete (RC) building structures subject to earthquake loading, considering detailed nonlinear dynamic analysis. Noting the potentially prohibitive computational demand of conventional nonlinear finite element analysis based on a monolithic treatment, the proposed approach utilises recent development in partitioned modelling for parallel processing employing a novel dual super-element concept. A case study of a realistic RC building subject to seismic ground excitation is presented, where monolithic as well as alternative partitioned models are considered. It is shown that the proposed approach achieves exceptional parallel performance, which can be disproportionately more than the number of used partitions, in addition to other major benefits of scalability and overcoming memory bottlenecks. This confirms the prospects of the proposed approach as an accurate and computationally practical method for the nonlinear dynamic analysis of structures, in general, and the seismic assessment of RC buildings, in particular.

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