the objective of this paper is to present a new method for protecting the lives of residents in catastrophic earthquake failures of unreinforced masonry buildings by introducing some safe rooms within the buildings. the main idea is that occupants can seek refuge within the safe rooms as soon as the earthquake ground motions are felt. the information obtained from the historical ground motions ...

This work represents an effort to develop one plausible realization of the effects of the scenario event on tall steel moment-frame buildings. We have used the simulated ground motions with three-dimensional nonlinear finite element models of three buildings in the 20-story class to simulate structural responses at 784 analysis sites spaced at approximately 4 km throughout the San Fernando Vall...

The fundamental periods of buildings are essential to calculate the design base shear and lateral forces. Most seismic codes specify empirical formulae to estimate the fundamental vibration period of buildings. These empirical formulae are used for both lowand mediumrise buildings. These formulae depend on the building materials (steel, reinforced concrete etc), building types (frame, shear wal...

This study presents the optimal drift design method to control the elastic and inelastic performance of steel moment frames. This is formulated as a problem that minimizes the lateral displacement at the top of a building satisfying the constraints on the total structural weight and the column-to-beam strength ratios at the joints. This uses the resizing method based on the linear static analys...

Reinforced concrete frame buildings with Open Ground Story (OGS) are one of the most common building configurations in urban habitat. These configurations are known to be vulnerable to seismic excitations, primarily due to the sudden loss in strength in the ground story and differential stiffness distribution throughout the structure. The differential stiffness distribution is attributed primar...

Wave-propagation effects can be useful in determining the system identification of buildings such as the densely instrumented University of California, Los Angeles, Factor building. Waveform data from the 72-channel array in the 17-story moment-resisting steel frame Factor building are used in comparison with finiteelement calculations for predictive behavior. The high dynamic range of the 24-b...

Direct displacement based design (DDBD) is a conceptual framework that directly design a structure to achieve an expected performance level under specified seismic intensity. In this study, two important issues relevant to torsional response of mass eccentric 8-story RC building designed with DDBD approach are investigated. These issues are including the effects of unbalanced mass distribution ...

In this paper, the authors summarize the results of a parametric study devoted to evaluate the seismic behavior of low to medium rise regular special moment-resisting steel frames with hysteretic energy dissipation devices mounted on chevron steel bracing. For that purpose, 270 different building models were designed considering typical story heights and bay widths used in Mexican practice. The...

This paper presents an improved multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (IMOEA) for the design of planar steel frames. By considering constraints as a new objective function, single objective optimization problems turned to multi objective optimization problems. To increase efficiency of IMOEA different Crossover and Mutation are employed. Also to avoid local optima dynamic interference of mutat...