Influence of lateral load distributions on pushover analysis effectiveness

The effectiveness of two simple load distributions for pushover analysis recently proposed by the authors is investigated through a comparative study, involving static and dynamic analyses of seismic response of eccentrically braced frames. It is shown that in the upper floors only multimodal pushover procedures provide results close to the dynamic profile, while the proposed load patterns are always conservative in the lower floors. They over-estimate the seismic response less than the uniform distribution, representing a reliable alternative to the uniform or more sophisticated adaptive procedures proposed by seismic codes. © 2008 American Institute of Physics.