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Site Effects in Ground Motion Synthetics for Structural Performance Predictions

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Computational Methods in Earthquake Engineering

Part of the book series: Computational Methods in Applied Sciences ((COMPUTMETHODS,volume 21))

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Abstract

We study how the selection of site response model affects the ground motion predictions of seismological models, and in turn how the synthetic motion site response variability propagates to the structural performance estimation. For this purpose, we compute ground motion synthetics for six earthquake scenarios of a strike-slip fault rupture, and estimate the ground surface response for 24 typical soil profiles in Southern California. We use viscoelastic, equivalent linear and nonlinear analyses for the site response simulations, and evaluate the ground surface motion variability that results from the soil model selection. Next, we subject a series of bilinear single degree of freedom oscillators to the ground motions computed using the alternative soil models, and evaluate the consequent variability in the structural response. Results show high bias and uncertainty of the inelastic structural displacement ratio predicted using the linear site response model for periods close to the fundamental period of the soil profile. The amount of bias and the period range where the structural performance uncertainty manifests are shown to be a function of both input motion and site parameters. We finally derive empirical correlations between the site parameters and the variability introduced in structural analyses based on our synthetic ground motion simulations.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Southern California Earthquake Center. SCEC is funded by NSF Cooperative Agreement EAR-0106924 and USGS Cooperative Agreement 02HQAG0008. The SCEC contribution number for this chapter is 1344.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA

    Dominic Assimaki & Wei Li

  2. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Cyprus, 20537, 1678, Nicosia, Cyprus

    Michalis Fragiadakis

Authors
  1. Dominic Assimaki
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  2. Wei Li
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  3. Michalis Fragiadakis
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Correspondence to Dominic Assimaki .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Inst. Structural Analysis &, Seismic Research, National Technical Univ. Athen, Iroon Polytechniou Str. 9, Athens, 157 80, Greece

    Manolis Papadrakakis

  2. , Institute of Structural Analysis and Sei, National Technical University of Athens,, Iroon Polytechniou, Zagrafou Campus 9, Athens, 15780, Greece

    Michalis Fragiadakis

  3. National Technical University of Athens,, Iroon Polytechniou, Zografou Campus 9, Athens, 15780, Greece

    Nikos D. Lagaros

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Assimaki, D., Li, W., Fragiadakis, M. (2011). Site Effects in Ground Motion Synthetics for Structural Performance Predictions. In: Papadrakakis, M., Fragiadakis, M., Lagaros, N. (eds) Computational Methods in Earthquake Engineering. Computational Methods in Applied Sciences, vol 21. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0053-6_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0053-6_4

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