Evaluation of conventional and advanced pushover procedures for regular and irregular RC frames

This paper describes an investigation on the effectiveness of several conventional, multi-modal and adaptive pushover procedures. An extensive numerical study was performed considering eight RC frames characterized by a variable number of storeys and different properties in terms of regularity in elevation. The results of pushover analyses were compared with those of non-linear dynamic analyses, which were carried out considering different earthquake records and increasing values of earthquake intensity. The study was performed with reference to base shear-top displacement curves and to different storey response parameters. The obtained results allowed a direct comparison between pushover procedures, which in general were able to give a fairly good estimate of seismic demand with a tendency to better results for lower frames. The advanced procedures, in particular the multi-modal pushover, produced an improvement of results, more evident for irregular frames.