Seismic design and performance evaluation of steel-frame buildings designed using the 2005 National building code of Canada

The seismic design provisions in the current edition of the National building code of Canada significantly differ from those in the earlier version of the code. Although the code has moved from the earlier prescriptive provisions towards a more performance-based design, such design principles have not yet been fully implemented. In the present work, four ductile steel moment-resisting frame buildings with heights of 5, 10, 15, and 20 storeys, were designed for Vancouver using the newer code, and their performances were studied to determine the level of seismic protection implied in the code. Synthesized and scaled real ground motion records were used to evaluate the nonlinear dynamic response of these structures. Although the buildings achieved the collapse prevention performance objective of the code, variations in evaluated performance parameters for the different buildings were observed. Also, building performance was found to be affected by the presence of infill walls, as well as by the nature of selected ground motion records and the methods used to scale them to Vancouver uniform hazard spectra.