A consecutive modal pushover procedure for estimating the seismic demands of tall buildings

The nonlinear static procedure (NSP), based on pushover analysis, has become a favourite tool for use in practical applications for building evaluation and design verification. The NSP is, however, restricted to single-mode response. It is therefore valid for low-rise buildings where the behaviour is dominated by the fundamental vibration mode. It is well recognized that the seismic demands derived from the conventional NSP are greatly underestimated in the upper storeys of tall buildings, in which higher-mode contributions to the response are important. This paper presents a new pushover procedure which can take into account higher-mode effects. The procedure, which has been named the consecutive modal pushover (CMP) procedure, utilizes multi-stage and single-stage pushover analyses. The final structural responses are determined by enveloping the results of multi-stage and single-stage pushover analyses. The procedure is applied to four special steel moment-resisting frames with different heights. A comparison between estimates from the CMP procedure and the exact values obtained by nonlinear response history analysis (NL-RHA), as well as predictions from modal pushover analysis (MPA), has been carried out. It is demonstrated that the CMP procedure is able to effectively overcome the limitations of traditional pushover analysis, and to accurately predict the seismic demands of tall buildings.