Seismic response of a tall building to recorded and simulated ground motions

Nenad Bijelic, Ting Lin, & Gregory Deierlein

Published May 14, 2014, SCEC Contribution #1930

Seismological modeling technologies are advancing to the stage of enabling fundamental
simulation of earthquake fault ruptures, which offer new opportunities to simulate extreme
ground motions for collapse safety assessment and earthquake scenarios for community
resilience studies. With the goal toward establishing the reliability of simulated ground motions
for performance-based engineering, this paper examines the response of a 20-story concrete
moment frame building analyzed by nonlinear dynamic analysis under corresponding sets of
recorded and simulated ground motions. The simulated ground motions were obtained through a
larger validation study via the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) Broadband
Platform (BBP) that simulates magnitude 5.9 to 7.3 earthquakes. Spectral shape and significant
duration are considered when selecting ground motions in the development of comparable sets of
simulated and recorded ground motions. Structural response is examined at different intensity
levels up to collapse, to investigate whether a statistically significant difference exists between
the responses to simulated and recorded ground motions. Results indicate that responses to
simulated and recorded ground motions are generally similar at intensity levels prior to
observation of collapses. Collapse capacities are also in good agreement for this structure.
However, when the structure was made more sensitive to effects of ground motion duration, the
differences between observed collapse responses increased. Research is ongoing to illuminate
reasons for the difference and whether there is a systematic bias in the results that can be traced
back to the ground motion simulation techniques.

Citation
Bijelic, N., Lin, T., & Deierlein, G. (2014, 05). Seismic response of a tall building to recorded and simulated ground motions. Oral Presentation at 10th National Conference of Earthquake Engineering. doi: 10.4231/D3VH5CJ72.

Related Projects & Working Groups
Earthquake Engineering Implementation Interface