Elastoplastic Analysis Methods and Capacity Curve Developing Features

Abstract

Present-day earthquake engineering practice use to apply for seismic performance evaluation of buildings nonlinear static pushover analysis which is represented by now in various modifications. These modifications consider different analyzing conditions, structural characteristics or depend from some engineer preferences and judgements. But all of these nonlinear static analysis methods implies the capacity (pushover) curve generation for estimation the performance point which characterize the building response due the seismic excitation. For capacity curve developing structural engineers are eligible to use any adequate instrumentation that describes inelastic behavior of a structure in appropriate way. However, the appearance of pushover curve generated by the most commonly used structural analysis software is often not clear enough, contains big number of inflection points, for which reason it could not provide adequate definitive criterion of general structural stability without advanced studying of pushover curve developing methods. In this paper the simplified capacity curve representation method is proposed and it is shown how the capacity curve can be used for financial loss evaluation inflicted by a potential earthquake.