Guidelines for the Performance-Based Seismic Design of Steel MRF Structures

In 2010, the European Research Fund for Coal and Steel has provided financial support for the DiSTEEL project, which focuses on the displacement-based seismic design of steel moment resisting frames. As one of the final products of this 3-year effort, the objective of this report is to provide a set of comprehensive guidelines for the performance-based seismic design of steel MRF buildings.

This report first discusses the current state-of-the-art of performance-based earthquake engineering and identifies a range of potentially critical structural and non-structural performance criteria together with other important inputs for the performance-based design of steel frames. The main body of the report provides a detailed description of the displacement-based design methodology for regular steel MRFs with guidance for buildings possessing either full or partial-strength and either rigid or semi-rigid connections. Guidelines are also provided to illustrate how the DBD approach can be extended to MRF systems with setbacks over their height and for dual RC wall-steel MRF systems. The design procedure is illustrated through step-by-step examples for different case study buildings considering different joint typologies.

The report then explains different advanced modelling and analysis strategies that could be adopted to confirm the performance of a building or render the DBD solution code-compliant. Also, the potential influence of soil-structure interaction on the seismic response of steel MRF systems is considered. Finally, discussion about cost-considerations for buildings with steel MRFs is provided and, in an effort to consider full life-cycle costs, a simplified means of estimating expected annual losses is described.