Simplified seismic sidesway collapse analysis of frame buildings

SUMMARY This paper presents the development and assessment of a simplified procedure for estimating the seismic sidesway collapse margin ratio of building structures. The proposed procedure is based on the development of a robust database of seismic peak displacement responses of nonlinear single‐degree‐of‐freedom systems for various seismic intensities and uses nonlinear static (pushover) analysis without the need for nonlinear time history dynamic analysis. The proposed simplified procedure is assessed by comparing its collapse capacity predictions on 72 different building structures with those obtained by nonlinear incremental dynamic analyses. The proposed simplified procedure offers a simple, yet efficient, computational/analytical tool that is capable of predicting collapse capacities with acceptable accuracy for a wide variety of frame building structures. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.