Published Paper Details:

The main objective of seismic engineering is to design the buildings to resist the force generated from ground motion in a safe manner, which prevents the total damage of the building. When the earthquake motion occurs, it was observed that the structure may not totally collapse, but there is a damage level to structures, economic loss because of inability of the building function, and the cost of repair were unpredictably high. Existing seismic codes are forced based controlled design, using the base shear concept. The need for changes in the existing seismic design methodology existing in seismic codes has been widely recognized. One of the major developments in seismic design over the past 10 years has been increased emphasis on limit states design, now generally termed Performance Based Seismic Design (PBSD). Performance based seismic design is aimed at controlling the structural damage based on precise estimations of proper response of the structure using nonlinear analysis in seismic design. This paper discusses seismic capacity of structure to resist earthquake force for moment resisting frames with medium ductility class using (PBSD) by the capacity spectrum method and obtaining the performance factor (P-Factor) for different levels of damage that can be used in seismic design instead of response modification factor (R-Factor) to overcome the limitation in response modification factor and to represent real performance of the structure.