Evaluation of Ground Motion Selection Techniques for Seismic Rigid Sliding Block Analyses

Abstract

AbstractSeismic sliding block displacements provide a useful index for the seismic performance of a slope and are computed for a suite of acceleration-time histories selected to fit a target ground motion. This paper explores the effect of different ground motion selection techniques on computed rigid sliding block displacements. In particular, capturing the characteristics of ground shaking through the consideration of the additional ground motion parameters that influence sliding displacement [i.e., peak ground velocity (PGV) and Arias intensity (Ia)] is investigated. Rigid sliding block displacements are computed for ground motion suites scaled to a target peak ground acceleration (PGA) and selected using different approaches. Two suites are selected to fit target acceleration response spectra [i.e., uniform hazard spectra (UHS) and conditional mean spectra (CMS)], and three suites are selected to fit conditional probability distributions for PGV and Ia through the generalized conditional intensity mea...