Assessment of improved nonlinear static procedures in FEMA-440

Nonlinear static procedures (NSPs) presented in the FEMA-440 document are evaluated for nondegrading three- to nine-story reinforced concrete moment-resisting frame systems. Evaluations are based on peak single-degree-of-freedom displacement, peak roof, and interstory drifts estimations. A total of 78 soil site records and 24 buildings with fundamental periods varying between 0.3 s-1.3 s are used in 2,832 linear and nonlinear response-history analyses to derive the descriptive statistics. The moment magnitude of the ground motions varies between 5.7 and 7.6. All records are within 23 km of the causative fault representing near-fault ground motions with and without pulse signals. The statistics presented suggest that lateral loading patterns used in pushover analysis to idealize the building systems play a role in the accuracy of NSPs investigated. Both procedures yield fairly good deformation demand estimations on the median. Displacement coefficient method (DCM) tends to overestimate the global deformation demands with respect to the capacity spectrum method (CSM). The conservative deformation demand estimations of DCM are correlated with the normalized lateral strength ratio, R. The CSM tends to overestimate the deformation demands for the increasing displacement ductility, mu.