Steel Moment Frames, to meet certain lateral stability criteria, can often be considered overdesigned [1]. In this paper, an assessment of the behavior of steel frames under the influence of dynamic loads is made. By applying the criteria for capacitive design, proposed by Eurocode 8, the dimensioning of a 2D regular Moment Frame was carried out.

Special emphasis is placed on the implementation and interpretation of the rationality of the interstory drift sensitivity coefficient θ. To assess the rationality of the coefficient θ, a non-linear static analysis of the 2D Moment Frame was performed. In the analysis, the geometric and material nonlinearities of the elements are included using the concept of distributed plasticity. The stiffness of the beam-column connection is modeled as ideally rigid and its behavior is taken into account in the analysis. The results obtained in this way are compared with the criteria proposed by Eurocode 8.