Introducing a simple shear building model for eccentrically braced frames

Lateral stiffness of eccentrically braced frames (EBF) is vital in computing story drifts. it is composed of flexural, shear, and axial stiffness of various members of the frame. In this paper a new shear building model is used which have the same equivalent lateral stiffness as the assumed EBF in each story. This shear building model can facilitate non-linear time history analyses and is almost the same accurate as a detailed model of EBF. The accuracy of this shear building model is verified by pushover and Incremental Dynamic Analysis (IDA). For this purpose, different EBFs and their equivalent shear buildings are modeled and designed; the maximum inter-story drifts and roof displacements of both EBFs and shear building models are computed by IDA analyses for 19 different records and compared. The results show appropriate consistency between the response of introduced shear building models and corresponding EBFs in nonlinear time-history analyses.