A State of Art Literature Review on Direct Displacement-Based Design for Seismic Structural Analysis

Earthquakes are one of the most disastrous forces which cannot be stopped or prevented but their effects can be minimized with minimal causalities’ of lives and structural damages. Over the past decade, analysis and determination of the seismic site response has gone from a topic of controversy to the mainstream issue addressed in most building codes, research and practice. Structural design has headed a path from Working Stress Design towards Performance-based Design. As design criteria are expressed in terms of achieving stated performance objectives when the structure is subjected to stated levels of seismic hazard. Performance levels, indeed, are described in terms of displacements, as damage is better correlated to displacements rather than forces. As a consequence, new design approaches, based on displacements, have been recently implemented. One of such approach is the Direct Displacement-Based Design (DDBD), firstly proposed by Priestley (1993). The fundamental principle of DDBD is to obtain a structure which will reach a target displacement profile when subjected to earthquakes consistent with a given reference response spectrum. An importance of DDBD that has been extracted from different literatures has been described in this paper.