A new probabilistic long-period critical excitation procedure for isolated building structures

Abstract

The present paper develops a new procedure for finding the most unfavorable long-period excitation for isolated building structures based on the probabilistic critical excitation method. The upper bound of earthquake input energy per unit mass is considered the problem’s constraint, and a modified power spectral density (PSD) function is proposed to conform to the new constraint. It is shown that the new constraint can be used as a criterion to estimate the possible range of input energy of similar earthquakes. In addition, the new PSD function can control the excitation’s intensity. Finally, three base-isolated shear buildings modeled as multi degree of freedom systems with nonproportional damping are considered, and the critical excitations for each model are found based on the proposed method. To examine the reliability of the results, three actual accelerograms with a considerably high level of total input energy are selected as benchmarks and linear dynamic analyses are conducted using these accelerograms along with the generated critical excitations. The results show that the generated long-period excitations can better estimate the structural behavior (i.e., maximum displacement, drift, and absolute acceleration of stories) than the actual benchmark accelerograms.