Abstract: The earthquake forces used in design codes of buildings should be theoretically determinable. This work examines the seismic force modification factor R based on elastic-plastic time-history earthquake analysis of SDOF systems, wherein the hysteresis models are elastic-perfectly-plastic (EPP), elastic-linearly-hardening (ELH), shear-slipped and bilinear-elastic. The latter two models are analysed for separating the effect of the ductility and the energy-dissipating capacity. Three-hundred eighty-eight earthquake records from different site conditions are used in analysis. The ductility is taken to be 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6, with the damping ratio being 0.02, 0.035 and 0.05 respectively. The post-yield stiffness ratios 0.0, 0.1 and 0.2 are used in the analysis. The R spectra are standardized by the characteristic period of the earthquake records, which leads to a much smaller scatter in averaged numerical results. It was found that the most important factor determining R is the ductility. R increases more than linearly with ductility. The energy-dissipating capacity, damping and the post-yield stiffness are the less important factors. The energy dissipating capacity is important only for structures with short period and moderate period (0.3≤T/T_g<5.0). For EPP and ELH models, R for 0.05 damping is 10% to 15% smaller than for 0.02 damping. For EPP and ELH models, greater post-yield stiffness leads to greater R, but the influence of post-yield stiffness is obvious only when the post-yield stiffness is less than 10% of the initial stiffness. By means of statistical regression analysis the relation of the seismic force modification factor R with the natural period of the system and ductility for EPP and ELH models were established for each site and soil condition.

Key words: Aseismic design, Seismic force modification coefficient, Ductility, Energy-dissipating capacity

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