The seismic performance of a three-story knee-braced moment-resisting frame (KBMRF), which was typically employed to support pipelines for oil or gas, was investigated. Nonlinear static pushover analyses were performed first to observe the force-displacement relationship under increasing seismic load. Then nonlinear dynamic time-history analyses were carried out usingeight earthquake ground motion time-histories scaled to fit the design spectrum of UBC-97. It turned out that the maximum inter-story drift was smaller than the drift limit of 1.5 % of the structure height, and that the columns remained elastic. Based on these analytical results, it can be concluded that the seismic performance of the structure satisfies all the requirements regulated in the seismic code.

• Hyun-Hoon Choi(Ph. D candidate, Dept. of Architectural Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University)
• Jin-Koo Kim(Dept. of Architectural Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University) Corresponding author