Evaluation of Story Drift under Pushover Analysis in Reinforced Concrete Moment Frames

The accurate prediction of story drift and its distribution along the height of the structure is very critical for seismic performance evaluation since the non-structural damage is directly related to the story drift. Pushover analysis is an accepted method for seismic evaluation of existing structures as well as performance-based design of new structures. Regarding assumptions and limitations in pushover analysis, there is a need to estimate the error that would affect the accuracy of story drift. This paper investigates the validity of pushover analysis to predict story drift under different lateral load patterns. For this purpose, several reinforced concrete moment frames with different heights were analyzed using pushover and nonlinear time history analyses and obtained results were compared to evaluate the error level.