An equivalent linear SDOF system for prediction of nonlinear displacement demands of non-ductile reinforced concrete buildings with shear walls

Reinforced concrete (RC) shear wall structures are one of the most widely used structural systems to resist seismic loading all around the world. Although there have been several efforts to provide conceptually simple procedures to reasonably assess the seismic demands of structures over recent decades, it seems that lesser effort has been put on a number of structural forms such as RC shear wall structures. Therefore, this study aims to represent a simple linear response spectrum -based method which can acceptably predict the nonlinear displacements of a non -ductile RC shear wall structure subjected to an individual ground motion record. An effective period and an equivalent damping ratio are introduced as the dynamic characteristics of an equivalent linear SDOF system relevant to the main structure. By applying the fundamental mode participation factor of the original MDOF structure to the linear spectral response of the equivalent SDOF system, an acceptable estimation of the nonlinear displacement response is obtained. Subsequently, the accuracy of the proposed method is evaluated by comparison with another approximate method which is based on linear response spectrum. Results show that the proposed method has better estimations for maximum nonlinear responses and is more utilizable and applicable than the other one.