RESEARCH ARTICLE
Influence of Seismic Behavior Factor on the Design of Building Structures for Low Seismic Demands Regions
Alejandro Hernández-Martínez*, 1, Andrés E. Ortíz-Vargas2, Adrián D. García-Soto1, Jesús G. Valdés-Vázquez1, Mabel Mendoza-Pérez1
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2015Volume: 9
First Page: 274
Last Page: 280
Publisher ID: TOCIEJ-9-274
DOI: 10.2174/1874149501509010274
Article History:
Received Date: 7/10/2014Revision Received Date: 28/10/2014
Acceptance Date: 28/11/2014
Electronic publication date: 28/5/2015
Collection year: 2015
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
The use of reduced seismic forces obtained from elastic response spectra analysis is a common practice for structural design purposes. This procedure is used: (a) To take advantage of the nonlinear behavior of the structural elements that conform the entire structure, and (b) To reduce the initial cost of the construction, allowing certain degree of damage if a severe earthquake occurs, but trying to avoid collapse with good structural design and construction detailing. In this paper, structural analyses were performed using several seismic reduction coefficients and the considered structures were designed for low seismic design regions according to the Mexico construction codes for both, serviceability limit states and ultimate limit states. Results show that the final design is strongly dependent on allowed interstory drift, associated to lateral displacements. Results also showed that, reducing significantly the seismic forces is not directly associated with a reduction in the initial cost of the structure, i.e., the final design for different seismic behavior factor may have similar seismic vulnerability.