Research Article Seismic Performance Evaluation of Special RC Frames with Gravity Steel Columns under the Base Level Amin Zaherdannak, 1 Amirhosein Shabani , 1,2 and Saeed Erfani 1 1 Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic), Tehran, Iran 2 Department of Civil Engineering and Energy Technology, Oslo Metropolitan University, Oslo, Norway Correspondence should be addressed to Saeed Erfani; sderfani@aut.ac.ir Received 4 March 2020; Revised 12 April 2020; Accepted 13 May 2020; Published 30 June 2020 Academic Editor: Roberto Palma Copyright © 2020 Amin Zaherdannak et al. is is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. In many multistory buildings, basement levels are used as parking spaces. However, dimensions of reinforced concrete columns at these levels cause them to be unideal parking spaces. An alternative is to replace the RC columns in middle frames with steel columns that are not a part of seismic force resisting system and only support vertical loads, therefore have smaller sections. Using simply supported steel columns under the base level is beneficial not only because they have smaller cross-sections which lead to increasing the parking space but also these steel columns are easier to be replaced after any possible damages and can be considered as convenient alternatives compared to ordinary RC columns in construction. In this research, seismic performance of structures implementing the suggested alternative is evaluated using nonlinear static and dynamic analyses and compared to that of regular counterparts. Results show that these structures pass the acceptability tests proposed by FEMA P695 methodology. Moreover, seismic performance factors of these two structural systems have been calculated and proposed. 1. Introduction To minimize casualties in large earthquakes, building codes provide structural engineers with seismic design require- ments. is goal can be generally achieved by limiting the probability of global structural collapse of buildings to relatively low levels. However, not even total satisfaction of a building code provisions can necessarily mean that a building will meet certain performance objectives during large earthquakes. Compared to the intended performance objective of the building code, the performance exhibited by the building may or may not be adequate. erefore, a methodology is needed for evaluating the performance of any given building designed based on requirements of a building code. e methodology introduced in FEMA P695 satisfies this need and it has been used in this study. In the system, the performance of which is evaluated in this study, the upper part consists of special RC moment frames. Several research efforts have focused on developing methods to improve seismic design procedure of RC frames beyond minimum code requirements [1–3] and perfor- mance-based earthquake engineering is used to assess the effectiveness of these improvements [4, 5]. Seismic collapse safety of ductile moment frames has been assessed by Haselton [6] and seismic collapse capacity of nonductile RC frames is evaluated and compared with ductile moment frames by Abbie et al. [7]. FEMA P695 introduces a methodology for quantifica- tion of building seismic performance factors used in seismic design and for specifying whether a structure satisfies the seismic performance objectives of building codes using the probabilistic assessment of collapse risk [8]. According to FEMA P695 methodology, Archetypes for nonlinear analyses must be selected so that they cover normal variations of key characteristics of structures [8], characteristics capable of affecting the overall seismic be- havior of structures such as height and bay length. en, archetypes with similarities in their structural behaviors and characteristics are classified into distinct performance groups. Hindawi Shock and Vibration Volume 2020, Article ID 8825258, 11 pages https://doi.org/10.1155/2020/8825258