The seismic response of inelastic structures
Abstract
A thirteen storey, two bay, reinforced concrete framed structure is subjected to a series of non-linear, dynamic analyses in an attempt to find some correlation between the damaging potential of various digitised earthquakes and their relative strengths which have been computed in a variety of ways. Much of the previous work in this field has been with respect to simple one degree of freedom systems and these do not appear to give any indication of the correlation that could be expected for a non-linear multi-degree of freedom structure.
The results show the effects of the different scalings of the various earthquakes and compare these with those obtained for the familiar North-South component of the May 18, 1940 El Centro earthquake. These results highlight the difficulty of trying to relate the use of such a dynamic earthquake analysis to the present pseudo-static code requirements. Further, the results of the analyses show also the great difference between the present assumption of the plastic hinge distributions, used in the ultimate seismic design method, and those observed during the earthquake excitation with the consequences on the lower-floor column axial loads.