Tall building performance-based seismic design using SCEC broadband platform site-specific ground motion simulations

Earthquake Engineering and Structural Dynamics
By: , and 

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Abstract

The scarcity of strong ground motion records presents a challenge for making reliable performance assessments of tall buildings whose seismic design is controlled by large-magnitude and close-distance earthquakes. This challenge can be addressed using broadband ground-motion simulation methods to generate records with site-specific characteristics of large-magnitude events. In this paper, simulated site-specific earthquake seismograms, developed through a related project that was organized through the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) Ground Motion Simulation Validation (GMSV) Technical Activity Group, are used for nonlinear response history analyses of two archetype tall buildings for sites in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Bernardino. The SCEC GMSV team created the seismograms using the Broadband Platform (BBP) simulations for five site-specific earthquake scenarios. The two buildings are evaluated using nonlinear dynamic analyses under comparable record suites selected from the simulated BBP catalog and recorded motions from the NGA-West database. The collapse risks and structural response demands (maximum story drift ratio, peak floor acceleration, and maximum story shear) under the BBP and NGA suites are compared. In general, this study finds that use of the BBP simulations resolves concerns about estimation biases in structural response analysis which are caused by ground motion scaling, unrealistic spectral shapes, and overconservative spectral variations. While there are remaining concerns that strong coherence in some kinematic fault rupture models may lead to an overestimation of velocity pulse effects in the BBP simulations, the simulations are shown to generally yield realistic pulse-like features of near-fault ground motion records.

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Publication type Article
Publication Subtype Journal Article
Title Tall building performance-based seismic design using SCEC broadband platform site-specific ground motion simulations
Series title Earthquake Engineering and Structural Dynamics
DOI 10.1002/eqe.3364
Volume 50
Issue 1
Year Published 2021
Language English
Publisher Wiley
Contributing office(s) Earthquake Science Center
Description 18 p.
First page 81
Last page 98
Country United States
State California
City Los Angeles, San Bernardino, San Francisco
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