A comparative study of two models for the seismic analysis of buildings

Abstract

This paper presents a model for the seismic analysis of buildings, taking two lumped masses at each level in a structure’s free nodes and comparing them to the traditional model which considers lumped masses per level, i.e., a mass for each floor of the entire building. This is usually done in the seismic analysis of buildings; not all values are conservative in the latter, as can be seen in the table of results. Both models took shear deformations into account. Therefore, the usual practice of considering a lumped mass per each level would not be a recommended solution; using two lumped masses per level is thus proposed and is also more related to real conditions.

Keywords

• modal analysis
• spectral analysis
• eigenvalues and eigenvectors
• modal participation factor
• spectral acceleration
• maximum normal coordinate vector