SEISMIC RESPONSE OF INELASTIC STRUCTURES.

A thirteen-storey, two-bay, reinforced concrete framed structure is subjected to a series of non-linear, dynamic analyses in an attempt to find some correlation between the damaging potential of various earthquakes and their relative strengths. The effects of different scalings of the various earthquakes are compared with those of the May 18, 1940, El Centro earthquake. These results highlight the difficulty of relating the use of such a dynamic earthquake analysis to the present pseudo-static code requirements. The analyses also show the great difference between the present assumption of plastic hinge distributions, used in the ultimate seismic design method, and those observed during the earthquake excitation.