Assessment of ASCE 41-06 Pushover Procedure in Performance Evaluation of Concrete Vertical Irregular Buildings

Irregular buildings make up a large portion of  urban infrastructure. Presence of irregularities can be due to architectural and  user changes in building stories. Main objective of this article is evaluate seismic performance of structures with vertical irregularities. Seismic responses are obtained by enveloping peak inelastic responses resulting from pushover analyses according to provided pattern in ASCE/SEI 41-06 standard. To verify and appraise procedure, it is applied to 10, 15, and 20-storey models with irregular distribution of mass, stiffness and strength along height. Results from the pushover procedure are compared with results obtained by nonlinear response history analysis (NL-RHA). Results of research reveal that seismic response of building structures is more sensitive to stiffness irregularities than to mass irregularities and strength irregularities. Nonlinear static procedure that proposed in standard  can predict to a reasonable accuracy peak inelastic responses, such as plastic rotations of hinges, story drifts and shear stories in vertically irregular structures