| Abstract: | Pushover methods for seismic assessment of buildings under multidimensional earthquakes have been studied and retrofitted. However, these current methods are not suitable when applied to widely adopted arch‐type structures characterized by strong geometrical nonlinearity and coupling effects. An improved multidimensional modal pushover procedure with two‐stage analyses is proposed for seismic evaluation of latticed arches. Taking overall multidimensional response into consideration, modal stiffness of the equivalent single‐degree‐of‐freedom system is derived, and its capacity curve is determined during the first‐stage analysis. To provide a deformation profile with algebraic signs of response retained, the second‐stage analysis is conducted using the pushover load pattern derived from modal displacement superposition. The objective of the improved procedure is to overcome the drawback of the conventional modal pushover method, which describes the capacity curve resorting to base shear and roof displacement, and that of quadratic combination rules which eliminate the sign reversals of response. To validate its serviceability, nodal displacements and element stresses, as well as the yielding members, of two typical latticed arches are calculated. Through comparative analysis, the results by the improved procedure exhibit good agreement with those by response history analysis. Additionally, this procedure demonstrates great superiority over the conventional method for its satisfying accuracy. |
