A new approach to determine the base shear of steel frame structures

Abstract

Base shear (V) is the maximum lateral force that will occur due to seismic ground motion at the base of a structure. Calculations of base shear depend on a lot of factors such as soil conditions, level of ductility, fundamental period of vibration of the structure, etc. A great number of methodologies have been developed to determine the dynamic responses of individual frameworks. However, there is no well established empirical solution of the dynamic response of the problem due to the base shear of the steel frames. In this study, a formulation based on NN to determine the dynamic response of both braced and unbraced plane steel frames are provided. The presented formulation is a function of number of stories (ns), bays of the frames (nb), and soil types (Z). The training and testing patterns of the proposed NN formulation are obtained from linear Finite Element Analysis (FEA) solution. The NN-based formulation results are compared with the results obtained from numerical and some current design codes. The NN-based formulation results are found to be more accurate. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.