INCREMENTAL DYNAMIC ANALYSIS AND SEISMIC PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF AN ALUMINUM FRAMED BUILDING COMPARED WITH STEEL

This paper summarizes a study performed to evaluate the seismic performance of aluminum structures. The effect of different stress-strain behavior between aluminum and steel material on the seismic performance of two functionally similar structures is the focus of this study. A one-story building archetype was chosen and the FEMAP695 approach was employed to study seismic performance factors for the building designed either from aluminum or steel. A geometric and material nonlinear model employing shell and beam finite elements, but excluding fracture, was developed to analyze the behavior of both buildings under earthquake ground motions. Incremental dynamic analysis was performed on the two archetypes and a fragility curve describing the probability of collapse versus the earthquake intensity was derived for each building. Finally, the performance of the two buildings was evaluated, showing that the aluminum building performed comparably to the steel building. It was observed in the models that the hysteresis behavior for the aluminum building develops primarily through interaction between buckling and yielding of the flanges at beam-column connections and at column supports.