Mehdi Izadpanah

Behavior factor of a structure plays a crucial role in designing and predicting the inelastic responses of it. Recently, irregular buildings have been interested in many designers. To design irregular structures, recognizing the inelastic behavior of them is necessary. The main objective of this study is to determine the behavior factor of irregular Reinforced Concrete Moment Resisting Frames (RCMRFs) via nonlinear Incremental Dynamic Analysis (IDA). To do so, first, several frames are designed according to the regulations of the Iranian national building code. Then the nonlinear incremental dynamic analysis is performed on these structures and the behavior factors are achieved. The acquired results are compared with those obtained using pushover analysis and it is shown that the behavior factors acquired from the nonlinear incremental dynamic analysis are somewhat larger than those obtained from pushover analysis. Eventually, two practical relations are proposed to predict the behavior factor of irregular RCMRFs. Since these relations are based on the simple characteristics of frames such as: irregularity indices, the height and fundamental period, the behavior factor of irregular RCMRFs can be achieved efficiently using these relations. The proposed relations are applied to design of four new irregular RCMRFs and the outcomes confirm the accuracy of the aforementioned relations.