A novel definition of damage states for structural elements in framed reinforced concrete buildings

In this article, damage states for Reinforced Concrete (RC) elements of framed RC buildings, including beams, columns, and joints, were presented and defined. For this purpose, the benchmark RC structures were considered, and details of their members were extracted. Each of the elements was separately modeled, and a pushover load was applied until the observed force/moment reached the predicted amount obtained by verified soft computing techniques. Consequently, the capacity curves were derived and scaled to specify the average curves and also to determine their corresponding equations. Using these formulations, damage states were defined for the considered structural elements. The ability of the proposed damage states was also investigated for six RC frames by eighteen three-dimensional time-history analyses as a numerical study. The framework proposed in this research can be able to present a better description of the damaged RC frame rather than the existing models, which only consider the drifts. Finally, it could be declared that the introduced damage states have great potential for seismic studies related to the behavior of structural elements.