The Effect of Story Drifts in Determining the Earthquake Performance of High-Rise Buildings

In performance-based design and assessment, there are prescriptive limits based not only on element-based performance evaluation but also on comparing story drifts with limit values. The process of determining performance levels at the element level involves obtaining the required data through numerous calculation steps, followed by evaluation, which makes it a time-consuming process. The iterative nature of this process emphasizes the importance of selecting the structural system, element dimensions, and target performance levels during the preliminary design stage to ensure they are consistent with the final analysis results. For this purpose, the determination of story drifts, which is widely accepted in the literature, is a critical aspect of performance evaluation studies, particularly for high-rise buildings, within the framework of deformation-based calculation assumptions. The continuum model is a practical approach for the approximate analysis of high-rise buildings including moment-resisting frames and shear wall-frame systems. In the continuum model, discrete buildings are simplified such that their overall behavior is described through the contributions of flexural and shear stiffnesses at the story levels. In this study, the aim is to enhance the Miranda and Taghavi (2005) model, which is classified among the approximate methods in the literature for determining story drifts and is developed within the framework of continuum model approaches.