Formulation of a direct displacement-based design procedure for steel eccentrically braced frame structures

The Direct displacement-based design (DBD) procedure of Priestley and co-workers has been well developed and tested for a large number of structural typologies and materials. However, development of the approach for steel structures, and in particular eccentrically braced frame (EBF) structures, has been relatively limited. In this paper, a Direct DBD procedure for steel EBF structures is formulated. New expressions are proposed for the yield drift and the design displacement profiles of EBFs with centrally located links. Reference is made to the literature for identification of suitable deformation limits and equivalent viscous damping expressions. The trial procedure is then applied to a 10-storey EBF structure and non-linear time-history analyses are undertaken to gauge the performance of the methodology. Results of the analyses indicate that the trial methodology performs reasonably well but future research is required to further develop and test the approach.