The rigid-plastic method on calculating displacement of structure under strong earthquake

In this paper finite element method program ANSYS is used to study difference between plastic displacements of structure under strong earthquake calculated using rigid-plastic model and calculated using elastic-plastic model. The results show that rigid-plastic model can be introduced to calculate the max plastic motion under strong earthquake. Motivated by this a rigid-plastic response spectrum is introduced, which provides an easy method to calculate the maximum plastic displacement of structure under strong earthquake. The procedure is formulated using a step by step format followed by an example. Results are compared with refined elastic-plastic Time-History Analysis and found to be extremely encouraging.