Rigid-plastic seismic design of reinforced concrete structures to multiple earthquake excitations

Based on the energy dissipation behavior of reinforced concrete frame withstand the strong earthquake, in this paper a seismic design procedure for reinforced concrete frame is proposed. The main idea is to neglect the contribution of the elastic by dynamic characteristic of the structure and the mechanical behavior of structure energy dissipation is described by the rigid-plastic perfectly. The structure may be designed in such a way that the rearranged plastic hinges 'perform' mainly in the plastic range to dissipate energy and the remaining part in the rigid domain in order to avoid collapsing under the strong earthquake. The procedure is based on the plasticity namely the choice of a suitable collapse mechanism and the transition from a multi-storey system to an equivalent Rigid-Plastic Oscillator. It is shown that this allows the determination of the structure ultimate bearing capacity with respect to a pre-defined performance parameter using a rigid-plastic spectrum. This procedure simplifies the design structures to survive strong earthquakes. The procedure is used in a 3-storey-reinforced frame design. The results of comparison with refined Elasto-Plastic Time-History Analysis show good agreement.