Displacement-based seismic design and analysis of plan-asymmetric RC frames

The object of this paper is the evaluation of the seismic response of reinforced concrete frames designed according to the Direct Displacement-Based Design (DDBD) approach. The great part of research works about DDBD has been dedicated to planar frames, but recently also some proposals for 3D structures have been presented, in particular for wall structures. This paper will give a further contribution to the extension of the procedure for the case of plan-asymmetric RC frames. A set of RC frames was designed according to the DDBD procedure and considering asymmetric configurations in plan. These buildings were designed following a methodology aimed to account for the floor rotations on the basis of a given lateral strength distribution along the plan. The seismic behaviour of the designed frames was studied by adopting a fibre model and by performing pushover and non-linear dynamic analyses.