Optimum design and earthquake‐response constrained design of elastic shear buildings

Abstract

AbstractThe necessary and sufficient conditions for global optimality and the closed form solution are derived for a problem of minimizing a weighted sum of storey stiffnesses of a shear building subject to a fundamental frequency constraint. A set of higher frequency formulae is derived for optimally designed shear buildings with equal masses. It is shown that, if the weight coefficients are regarded as parameters for adjustment, the distribution of the SRSS estimates of the maximum interstorey drifts can be adjusted so as to coincide with a specified one. The base shear–fundamental period formulae and the base shear–design drift formulae are derived semi‐analytically for shear buildings with equal masses on the basis of the optimum design formulae and the SRSS estimates of the maximum interstorey drifts. Some numerical examples are presented in order to illustrate the validity of the proposed method of earthquake‐response constrained design.