Assessment of ASCE 41-17 nonlinear static procedure for near-fault and far-fault sites

Performance based seismic design (PBSD) is a promising approach for assessment of existing and new buildings. While nonlinear dynamic procedure (NDP) is regarded as the most accurate numerical evaluation tool in the PBSD context, simpler approaches such as nonlinear static procedure (NSP) and linear dynamic procedure (LDP) are more desirable for practitioners. Especially, NSP has become a popular approach among practitioners due to its simplicity and low computational costs. In this paper, the reliability of ASCE 41-17 nonlinear static procedure is investigated through consideration of 1250 single-degree-offreedom (SDOF) systems. Ten near-fault along with ten far-fault earthquake records are employed for evaluating responses of the considered SDOF systems. By performing 25000 nonlinear time-history analyses, it is shown that the reliability of NSP for near-fault sites is under question due to large and unconservative errors of the method. The results of this paper show that NSP errors for far-fault sites are less than those obtained for near-fault sites. However, they are conservative only if the fundamental period of the system is small.