Estimating the inter-story drift in high rise buildings with the flexural and shear cantilever beam and mode-acceleration method

In this study, the seismic inter-story drift of structures is estimated by a combination of mode-acceleration equations with the modelling of high-rise buildings with flexural and shear cantilever beams. In the equation presented for calculating the inter-story drift, having less knowledge of the building is adequate and this issue is of significance in estimating the nonstructural component forces, especially in high-rise buildings and also in the initial design of structures. Also, a comparison of inter-story drift estimated by the approximation method with an exact method indicates that the application of the mode-acceleration method compared to mode-displacement with a fewer number of modes comes close to the exact calculation, which facilitates and expedites the analysis. In order to carry out an exact evaluation of the presented equation, inter-story drift is calculated and compared in 10, 15 and 50 story buildings during three seismic records using approximate relations. Exact analysis of those structures is done in finite element Opensees software. The results of comparisons show that the presented equation provides an adequate estimation without the need for modelling and lengthy software analysis.