Displacement-based seismic design of regular reinforced concrete shear wall buildings

A displacement based method for the seismic design of reinforced concrete shear wall buildings of regular shape is presented. For preliminary design, approximate estimates of the yield and ultimate displacements are obtained, the former from simple empirical relations, and the latter to keep the ductility demand within ductility capacity and to limit the maximum storey drift to that specified by the codes. For a multi-storey building, the structure is converted to an equivalent single-degree-of-freedom system using an assumed deformation shape that is representative of the first mode. The required base shear strength of the system is determined from the inelastic demand spectrum corresponding to the ductility demand. In subsequent iterations a pushover analysis for the force distribution based on the first mode is used to obtain better estimates of yield and ultimate displacements taking into account stability under P–Δ effect. A multi-mode pushover analysis is carried out to find more accurate estimates of the shear demand.