Seismic economic losses in mid-rise steel buildings with conventional and emerging lateral force resisting systems

This paper investigates the seismic loss performances of mid-rise steel buildings adopting different lateral force resisting systems. The considered lateral force resisting systems include a moment resisting frame, a buckling restrained braced frame, and a frame consisting of re-centering non-buckling braces, which are denoted as MRF, BRBF, and RNBF, respectively. MRF and BRBF were designed following the equivalent lateral force procedure. The re-centering non-buckling braces in RNBF were intentionally designed to enable the system to have the same elastic inter-story strengths and stiffness values as BRBF. Incremental dynamic analyses (IDA) were performed for the three considered systems and the IDA result database were converted into their respective vulnerability functions. This research establishes economic loss performance pyramids based on the critical quantities identified from the vulnerability functions. Taking the volume of the economic loss performance pyramid as a measure, the authors compared the respective advantages and limitations of the considered systems in mitigating seismic economic losses.