A variant of modal pushover analyses (VMPA) based on a non-incremental procedure

A variant of modal pushover analysis (VMPA) is presented to evaluate the seismic performance of the structures. The suggested procedure is based on an iterative process in which secant stiffnesses are used both at the element level and in the modal response. VMPA diverges from the existing modal pushover analyses for the following reasons: (1) mode compatible adaptive forces are applied to the structure at each iteration step, (2) the application of the equal displacement rule in combination with secant stiffness based linearization in the spectral displacement (S_d)—spectral acceleration (S_a) relation eliminates the necessity to produce a modal capacity diagram for each mode. The displacement controlled algorithm determines the single ordinate of the modal capacity diagram corresponding to the target displacement demand for the nth mode (S_{dn_p}, S_{an_p}) by reducing elastic spectral acceleration (S_{an_e}) to converge to the plastic acceleration (S_{an_p}). A Matlab based computer program known as DOC3D-v2 is developed to implement the proposed procedure. To verify the success of the suggested procedure, 9- and 20-storey LA SAC buildings are analysed, and the resulting demands are compared with several existing procedures, such as the extended N2, MPA and MMPA, as well as nonlinear time history analyses performed for two different set of acceleration records. VMPA yields enhanced results in terms of storey drifts, especially for the 20-storey LA building, compared with the other methods. Although the storey displacements and drifts are largely consistent with nonlinear time history analysis results, conservative estimates are obtained for the storey shear forces.