Procedure for Assessing the Displacement Ductility Based on Seismic Collapse Threshold and Dissipated Energy Balance

Abstract eng:
Displacement ductility is a parameter that characterizes the seismic response of structures. Moreover, displacement ductility can be used in order to determine whether a structural design, performed according to a specific seismic code or not, may achieve the main goal of the seismic design: to develop energy dissipation in a stable manner. There is unanimous agreement among the scientific community that the determination of the displacement ductility is not an easy task, because the structural response usually does not show a clear location of the points that define yield and ultimate displacements, necessaries for its calculation. In this paper, the main procedures for ductility displacement are revised and compared, and then improvements are performed to such procedures to compute the displacement ductility. Improvements lead to determine the ultimate displacement using the seismic collapse threshold and the yield displacement by means of the balance of dissipated energy. The procedure has been used to calculate displacement ductility of reinforced concrete framed buildings with different kind of non-linear response (designed with and without seismic code prescriptions). Results depict that the procedure is suitably for the objectively determination of the displacement ductility of buildings with column-sway, mixed or beam-sway failure mechanisms.

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