Yield displacement is an important parameter that is directly used in computing damping factor of buildings in the Capacity Spectrum Method. In this paper, an evaluation method of a yield displacement of a building is firstly developed so that it can quantitatively consider hysteresis energy absorption characteristics of structural components. The proposed method is, secondly, examined based on a shaking table test of an 80% scale 5-story RC frame specimen to find the hysteresis damping factor of the specimen estimated following the proposed method can have a good agreement with those obtained based on Sa – Sd hysteresis test results.
