Design and seismic evaluation of MRFs in DC2 ductility class introduced in the new prEN1998 draft and comparison with TPMC

This work aims to analyse and evaluate the design rules proposed for DC2 ductility class in the new prEN1998 by means the design and assessment of MRFs with different height and length of the spans. DC2 is a medium ductility class, introduced in the new prEN1998 draft for a more economical design, so simplified design rules are proposed for avoiding only the so-called soft storey mechanism. The purpose of the work is the evaluation of the effectiveness of the proposed rules and the comparison with a more theoretically compliant design rules developed in the framework of the Theory of Plastic Mechanism Control (TPMC) adapted to be used according to the DC2 philosophy. A wide parametric analysis is developed on different structural schemes and the performance evaluation is made through pushover and IDA analyses. It can be pointed out that the soft storey mitigation criteria for the DC2 ductility class is not able to satisfy the design condition. Conversely, the approach based on the TPMC is able to assure the design goal.