Rational Use of Idealized Shear-Building Models to Approximate Actual Buildings

The paper aims to investigate the accuracies of idealization methods of the well-known shear-building models. Five idealization methods are adopted to idealize the structural story capacity curve within the range from zero to the deformation corresponding to the peak shear point. After the peak shear point, a skew branch followed by a constant branch are used to approximate the capacity curve. The five idealization methods are verified by using four reinforcement concrete (RC) frames with 3, 8, 12, and 18 stories. Results reveal that all the five idealization methods may cause remarkable errors in prediction of the period, displacements and accelerations of the actual buildings. The errors of the structural period by the five idealization methods are almost above 10–40%. The errors of the structural displacements and accelerations by the five idealization methods are almost above 30–90%. For all the five idealization methods, the prediction accuracy on displacement and acceleration will be dramatically increased if the comparison is only focused on the maximum value within all story rather than the maximum values of each story. The initial stiffness method provides the best predictions on periods of the actual buildings. The farthest point method provides better prediction than the other four idealization methods