Seismic Performance Assessment of a Multistorey Building Designed with an Alternative Capacity Design Approach

The actual seismic building codes have a prescriptive nature, and they are principally aimed to guarantee a prescribed life-safety level against a design-level earthquake even if some methods have been proposed to evaluate the seismic performance of a building along its entire service life. Among these, the performance-based seismic design method permits the design of buildings with a more realistic understanding of both risk of life for occupants and economic losses that may occur in future earthquakes. On the other side, the capacity design method, providing criteria to properly spread the inelastic deformation demand between the different structural elements, allows to establish a ductile collapse mechanism avoiding undesired brittle failures. In this context, modern building codes consider the adoption of a single value for the behaviour factor q to be used in the design process. All this should be argued since, especially for buildings characterized by storeys with different uses and occupancy ratios, the adoption of a single value for q could guide the design process to a solution not minimizing the seismic loss. With reference to these aspects, the paper shows the comparison of the seismic responses of a multistorey framed building designed following two different approaches. The first approach, suggested by many international codes, follows the capacity design rules and considers a single value for the behaviour factor valid for the whole building. In this first case, the damage mechanisms could affect, theoretically, every storey of the building. The second approach, proposed here, considers instead the possibility to adopt different behaviour factors to attribute to different storeys. In this way, it is possible to concentrate and localize the most severe earthquake-induced structural damage on (few) storeys, selected by the designers. By means of the seismic performance assessment methodology, the comparison between the two building responses is provided in terms of expected losses during the whole building service life and is reported in terms of both economical loss and human life loss. The results in the paper show that, if different behaviour factors are properly selected for different storeys, the design process can provide a solution characterized by lower values of seismic loss with respect to the case of the design assuming a single-q value.