A critical review of plastic design approaches for failure mode control of steel moment resisting frames

The work herein presented is devoted to the comparison between two design approaches leading to the same design goal, i.e. the design of structures able to develop a collapse mechanism of global type. These selected design procedures are the Performance- Based Plastic Design approach (PBPD) and the Theory of Plastic Mechanism Control (TPMC). To this scope reference is made to several MR-Frame structures designed by means of both procedures. The seismic performances of such MR-Frames have been investigated by both push-over and dynamic non-linear analyses.