Abstract

Near-source effects can amplify seismic ground motion, causing large demand to structures and thus their identification and characterization is fundamental for engineering applications. Among the most relevant features, forward-directivity effects may generate near-fault records characterized by a large velocity pulse and unusual response spectral shape amplified in a narrow frequency-band. In this paper, we explore the main statistical features of acceleration and displacement response spectra of a suite of 230 pulse-like signals (impulsive waveforms) contained in the NESS1 (NEar Source Strong-motion) flat-file. These collected pulse-like signals are analyzed in terms of pulse period and pulse azimuthal orientation. We highlight the most relevant differences of the pulse-like spectra compared to the ordinary (i.e., no-pulse) ones, and quantify the contribution of the pulse through a corrective factor of the spectral ordinates. Results show that the proposed empirical factors are able to capture the amplification effect induced by near-fault directivity, and thus they could be usefully included in the framework of probabilistic seismic hazard analysis to adjust ground-motion model (GMM) predictions.

Highlights

  • Near-fault effects are able to cause large seismic demand to structures compared to ground motion in far-field and their identification and characterization is fundamental for proper assessment of shaking for several engineering applications and seismic hazard analyses

  • In this paper we have shown the most relevant features of spectral response related to records affected by forward-directivity effects and calibrated a model for impulsive ground motions based on an empirical corrective factor

  • The main findings of the presented study include: (i) observations on the statistical features of pulse-like acceleration and displacement elastic spectra, (ii) a new near-source ground-motion model (GMM) of ordinary near-fault records and (iii) a new narrow-band amplification factor of elastic acceleration response that accounts for the increased seismic demand due to pulse-like effects

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Summary

Introduction

Near-fault effects are able to cause large seismic demand to structures compared to ground motion in far-field and their identification and characterization is fundamental for proper assessment of shaking for several engineering applications and seismic hazard analyses. We focus on forward-directivity effects identified by selecting the fullcycle pulses in the velocity time series, with the aim of investigating the pulse-like ground motion on spectral demand These effects have been widely studied by many authors from the phenomenological point of view [1,2,3,4,5,6]; they are not yet fully included in the context of Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Analyses (PSHA) and the current seismic design codes do not provide a proper representation of these effects. We modelled the narrow-band directivity factor based on the within-event part of the model residuals (i.e., the logarithmic difference between the observations and the model predictions) computed on a reference GMM calibrated on the no-pulse (ordinary) records of the same dataset

Near-Source Dataset
Pulses Identification
Effect of Pulses on Elastic Spectral Response
Reference GMM of No-Pulse Records
Application Example
Findings
Conclusions

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