Performance Evaluation of Seismic Force-Resisting Systems for Low-Rise Steel Buildings in Canada

Steel is one of the most popular seismic force resisting systems (SFRS) in use worldwide. In Canada, several SFRS have been prequalified for use in the national and provincial building codes. The design of each SFRS has been covered comprehensively in literature. However, no guidance has been provided in selecting the optimum system for a project. In this paper, a prototype building located in Vancouver, Canada, was designed nine times to utilize each of the prequalified SFRS. Detailed seismic hazard and finite element models were developed for each system. The performance in terms of initial construction and life-cycle cost was used to rank each SFRS. The result of this analysis shows that the eccentrically braced configuration has the lowest material usage and life cycle maintenance cost; it is therefore the most economic system in this study. The presented methodology is transparent and can be easily adopted by engineers to select the most economic seismic system for projects with different configurations and geometries than those given in this research. Furthermore, this system introduces a metric with which to estimate the life-cycle costs of a structure taking into account seismic damage over the service life.