Proposal of design rules for ductile X-CBFS in the framework of EUROCODE 8

Cross concentrically braced frames (X-CBFs) are commonly used as primary seismic resisting system, owing to their large lateral stiffness, simplicity of design, and relatively low constructional cost. Current EN 1998-1 provides design rules theoretically aiming at developing ductile global plastic mechanism, namely enforcing plastic deformations in the diagonal members, while the remaining structural members and connections should elastically behave. However, as widely demonstrated by many existing studies, the design and the corresponding seismic performance of EC8-compliant X-CBFs are generally affected by several criticisms, eg, difficulties in sizing of diagonal members, massive and non-economical structures, and poor seismic behavior. In light of these considerations, the research activity presented in this paper is addressed to revise the design rules and requirements given EN 1998-1 for X-CBFs to simplify the design process and to improve the ductility and the dissipative capacity of this structural system. Hence, design rules are proposed for the next version of EN 1998-1 and numerically validated by means of nonlinear dynamic analyses.