Seismic Design Forces. I: Rigid Nonstructural Components

The paper examines the seismic design force formulas that are currently prescribed in the 2003 NEHRP Provision for the design of nonstructural components in buildings, and presents new formulas to improve the these recommendations. The current code provisions are building independent and overly conservative, especially for the design of nonstructural components in tall buildings. This conservatism can be reduced by utilizing the information about the fundamental period of the building. New force formulas that depend on the building period are proposed. The proposed formulas are intended to avoid more involved analyses. They are validated by a comprehensive numerical study of several buildings of different periods analyzed for an ensemble of recorded earthquake acceleration time histories.