چكيده لاتين :
The objective ofthis paper is to present a new methodfor protecting the lives ofresidents
in catastrophic earthquake failures of unreinforced masonry buildings by introducing some safe
rooms within the buildings. The main idea is that occupants can seek refuge within the safe rooms
as soon as the earthquake ground motions are felt. The information obtained from the historical
ground motions happened in seismic zones around the globe expresses the lack ofenough safety of
masonry buildings against earthquake. For this potentially important reason, an attempt has been
made to create some cost-effective seismic-resistant areas in some parts of the existing masonry
buildings, which are called safe rooms. The practical method for creating these areas and
increasing the occupant safety ofthe buildings is to install some prefabricated steelframes in some
of their rooms or in their halls. These frames do not carry any service loads before earthquake.
However, ifa near field seismic event happens and the load bearing walls ofthe building destroy,
some parts of its floors, which are in the safe areas, will fall on the roof of the installed frames;
consequently, the occupants who have sheltered in the safe rooms will survive. This paper expresses
the experimental and theoretical work executed on the steel structures ofthe safe rooms for bearing
the shock and impact loads. Finally, it was concluded that both the strength and displacement
capacity of the steel frames were adequate to accommodate the distortions generated by seismic
loads and aftershocks properly:
