Displacement based assessment for precast concrete structures: application to a three story plane frame

Starting from the Direct Displacement Based Design (DDBD) procedure, a new assessment method is investigated in order to evaluate precast concrete structures. The proposed assessment procedure (Displacement Based Assessment – DBA) takes into account the moment-curvature and force-displacement relationship of typical precast connections, beam to column and column to foundation, to estimate the system equivalent viscous damping as a function of rotational and translational ductility of the structural elements and connections. The input data used in the assessment procedure, the displacement profile of the first inelastic mode of vibration and the system yield displacement, are obtained by means of a pushover analysis. The DBA procedure is applied to a three story precast concrete frame and validated by means of nonlinear incremental dynamic analysis.