The nonlinear dynamic analysis of civil engineering structures is a topic of high significance for civil engineering community. In recent years, the linear dynamic analysis, in which no damage is taken into account, was improved to consider various sources of nonlinearity. Many commercial software packages were developed to consider both the material and geometrical nonlinearity. A new technique, entitled the Force Analogy Method, was introduced recently. In this technique, the material nonlinearity is addressed by considering a constant stiffness matrix throughout the entire dynamic analysis. Based on the principle of superposition, the displacement vector is decomposed into an elastic and inelastic component. The inelastic component of the displacement will cause perturbation forces once this term is moved to the right hand side of the equation of motion. However, although this intriguing technique has proved to be both accurate and numerical efficient over the years, no paper has addressed the 3D models case yet. In this paper, the authors develop the fundamental approach to generalize FAM for modeling the nonlinear response of three dimensional frame structures. The numerical results obtained are compared and validated using a well established commercial software.
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