Interval complete quadratic combination rule for the response spectrum analysis of buildings with accidental eccentricity

The accidental torsion, caused by several sources of structural uncertainties, gets the elastic response of a building different from that computed. To take into account of these uncertainties, building codes impose the introducing in every storey of the buildings an artificial eccentricity, called accidental, as a fraction of the plan dimension. Because, according to building codes, the accidental eccentricity can mathematically be expressed as a modification of the mass matrix, it follows that each mass modifications require new dynamic analyses that could be cumbersome from a numerical point of view. This paper proposes a new combination rule to obtain in closed form the maximum responses of structures with mass modification by the response spectrum analysis (RSA) without solving any further eigenproblem. In particular, the proposed procedure, based on the application to the RSA of the interval perturbation method, leads to an extension of the classical complete quadratic combination rule to the analysis of structural systems with uncertain-but-bounded parameter. In particular, for structural systems with accidental eccentricity, the proposed approach allows to directly evaluate the worst condition for the structural elements with a single RSA. This very remarkable result is obtained by adopting a new modal combination rule, here called interval complete quadratic combination. Numerical results evidence a very good accuracy of the interval complete quadratic combination for single-storey buildings as well as for the analyzed multistorey buildings.