Development of an Enhanced Pushover Procedure for Performance-Based Seismic Evaluation of Buildings

The University Of Central Florida Board Of Trustees, Orlando FL

Investigators

Abstract

This award addresses the issue of inter-story drift and failure mechanisms that control the design of a structural system by carrying out a detailed and comprehensive study of both existing and evolving pushover methods. There have been several recent efforts to enhance FEMA-273 (1997) type procedures by indirectly incorporating high-mode effects in the evaluation process. While these new procedures have been shown to work in selective studies, a comprehensive evaluation of such techniques which identify their scope and limitations has yet to be conducted. The proposed evaluation will be carried out on a selected group of six existing buildings for which instrumented data from recent earthquakes is available. The six instrumented buildings will cover a practical range of building periods. The building models to be used in the analyses will be calibrated to measured response thereby ensuring the reliability of the ensuing evaluation exercises. These evaluations tasks will be conducted in two phases: the first phase will focus on the three FEMA-273 procedures, and the second phase will deal with improved multi-mode and adaptive pushover techniques. The importance of this project is to be recognized in light of the fact that the current state-of-practice in seismic engineering has begun to accept pushover analyses as a possible next step in the advancement of performance-based seismic engineering (PBSE). Until such time that routine nonlinear time-history analyses can be carried out in a design office, the need to develop simplified yet reliable static procedures is critical to the advancement of PBSE.