Simulating maximum and residual displacements of RC structures: II. Sensitivity

The simulated response of a structure subjected to seismic excitation is sensitive to the idealizations made to model its response. This paper examines critical idealizations and assumptions that have a strong influence on the accuracy of the maximum and residual displacements predicted by response-history analysis. A set of shake table tests are numerically reproduced for this purpose. The investigated idealizations include the discretization scheme, the axial load, the steel hysteretic model, the viscous damping ratio, and the time-integration step size. The results indicate that the simulated residual displacements are significantly more sensitive to the model idealizations than the maximum displacements. It is found that the adopted discretization scheme and the utilized steel hysteresis model have very large influences on simulated residual displacements.