Investigation the Effect of Cutting the Lateral Bearing System and Very Soft Story Irregularities on the Seismic Performance of Concentric Braced Frames

One of the most important issues in buildings is irregularity in the plan or height of the structure, which causes increasing the seismic damages. In irregularity in height, sudden changes in the dynamic properties of the structure including mass, lateral stiffness and strength of the structure occur. Therefore, the stage of making decision for determining the building configuration has a fundamental importance Irregular buildings must be able to withstand the lateral forces of earthquakes and winds. One of the most common earthquake-resistant systems in steel structures is the bracing system, which has been considered by engineers due to its good performance in previous earthquakes and reduced drift of buildings. However, some architectural constraints may cause the braces to be moved to the story level, which is subjected to irregularity of cutting the lateral bearing system, or the lateral braces may be weakened or removed due to poor supervision in some stories, in which case the story may be irregular. There is very soft story in the building. In this study, 7 scenarios in three states such as regular, very soft irregularity, and irregularity of cutting the lateral bearing system is considered for 5-story frame. These frames are designed based on seismic guidelines of standard 2800, and then, the performance of them has been evaluated by SAP2000 software using analyses methods such as equivalent static, spectral dynamics and time history dynamics under near-fault earthquakes. The aim of this study is to investigate the accuracy of these methods. The results showed that time history dynamic analysis is more accurate than other methods. For example, the error rate of the maximum displacement response of frame with irregularity of cutting the lateral bearing system in equivalent static analysis compared to spectral and time history dynamic analyses are 15% and 77%, respectively.