Seismic Design Method for Reducing the Variation of Peak Inter-Story Drifts along Building Height

Seismic Design Method for Reducing the Variation of Peak Inter-Story Drifts along Building Height

This study develops a seismic design approach, which has no need of additional structural members, to uniformly distribute the peak inter-story drift ratios along building heights. The generalized building model (GBM), which can effectively imitate a building, is employed to achieve this aim. The flexural-shear deformation factor of a GBM, denoted , characterizes the deformation type of the corresponding building. Varying the deformation type of a building changes the distribution of the peak inter-story drift ratios over the stories. Therefore, the proposed optimization approach searches for the optimal value of α, denoted αopt, so that the GBM's normalized variation of peak inter-story drift ratios is minimized. In light of αopt, the member properties of the original building model are adjusted.