Extension of Direct Displacement-Based Design to Plan-Asymmetric RC Frame Buildings

The object of this paper is the evaluation of the seismic response of reinforced concrete frames designed according to the DDBD (direct displacement-based design) approach. The great part of research works about DDBD has been dedicated to planar frames, but recently also some proposals for 3D structures have been presented, in particular for wall structures. This paper will give a further contribution to the extension of the procedure for the case of plan-asymmetric RC (reinforced concrete) frames. The extended methodology is aimed at accounting for the floor rotations on the basis of a given lateral strength distribution along the plan. The procedure was applied to two plan-asymmetric RC frames, characterized by the same geometry but different lateral strength distributions along the plan. The seismic behavior of the designed frames was studied by adopting a fiber model and by performing pushover and nonlinear dynamic analyses.