BLIND PREDICTION OF A FULL-SCALE 3 D STEEL FRAME TESTED UNDER DYNAMIC CONDITIONS

A blind analysis contest for a full-scale four-story building was announced in 2007 by the executive committee of the E-Defense steel building project, sponsored by the National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention in Japan. In this contest, each participant should predict the structural response before and after the test was performed using the three-dimensions shaking table located in Miki City, Hyogo Prefecture, Japan. This paper presents the results obtained from dynamic analyses performed on the building using a fibre element-based program. By comparing the results given by the program with experimental ones, the aim of the work was to demonstrate that reasonably accurate estimation of the nonlinear dynamic response of steel buildings is possible, even by non-necessarily proficient steel structures analysts, as was the case of the authors.