Seismic Assessment of RC Building According to ATC 40, FEMA 356 and FEMA 440

Saudi Building Code (SBC 301) including seismic design regulation is recently developed and released for immediate implementation. The design procedures according to SBC-301 are generally based on elastic force-based analysis method. Seismic engineers are recently turning to nonlinear static analysis or pushover analysis which predicts directly the amount and location of plastic yielding within a structure. The purpose of this paper was to evaluate the performance of the buildings, which were design according to SBC, using pushover analysis. Four typical RC frame structures are evaluated. Pushover analysis is performed to produce the ultimate building capacity. Performance levels of the buildings are specified according ATC-40, FEMA-356, and FEMA-440. The results show that the SBC design buildings generally satisfy to these methods acceptance criteria.