A pushover procedure for seismic assessment of buildings with bi-axial eccentricity under bi-directional seismic excitation

A new modal pushover procedure is proposed for seismic assessment of asymmetric-plan buildings under bi-directional ground motions. Although the proposed procedure is a multi-mode procedure and the effects of the higher and torsional modes are considered, the simplicity of the pushover procedure is kept and the method requires only a single-run pushover analysis for each direction of excitation. The effects of the frequency content of a specific ground motion and the interaction between modes at each direction are all considered in the single-run pushover analysis. For each direction, the load pattern is derived from the combined modal story shear and torque profiles. The pushover analysis is conducted independently for each direction of motion (x and y), and then the responses due to excitation in each direction are combined using SRSS (Square Roots of Sum of Squares) combination rule. Accuracy of the proposed procedure is evaluated through two low- and medium-rise buildings with 10% two-way eccentricity under different pairs of ground motions. The results show promising accuracy for the proposed method in predicting the peak seismic responses of the sample buildings.