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Are Current Design Spectra Sufficient for Soil-Structure Systems on Soft Soils?

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Advances in Performance-Based Earthquake Engineering

Part of the book series: Geotechnical, Geological and Earthquake Engineering ((GGEE,volume 13))

Abstract

Seismic codes have universally adopted smooth design acceleration spectra, on the basis of averaging of a large number of elastic response spectra of actual recordings. Such spectra have, for each soil category, an essentially constant acceleration plateau, S a, usually equal to 2.5 times the Peak Ground Acceleration, A, followed by a descending acceleration branch. The period range of the constant-acceleration plateau is larger for softer soils. However, such a flat shape of spectra has little resemblance to an actual soil-amplified spectrum. The unrealistic shape stems basically from the fact that the spectra of motions recorded on soft soils belonging to one soil category attain their maxima at different well-separated periods; thereby, averaging them eliminates their peaks and leads to a (spurious) flat spectrum. Through an extensive analytical parametric study we demonstrate that by normalizing the period of the spectra with the predominant period of motion, and then averaging, results in a bi-normalized spectrum (S a/A : T/T p) which has a sharp peak at T/T p = 1. It is found that this spectrum has peak value S a/A ≈ 3.75 (rather than 2.5), for a narrow range of normalized periods. The effect of such a spectrum especially on Soil Structure Interaction (SSI) studies may be drastically different from the beneficial effect of a (conventional) code spectrum.

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Acknowledgments

This work forms part of an EU 7th Framework research project funded through the European Research Council (ERC) Programme “Ideas”, Support for Frontier Research – Advanced Grant, under Contract number ERC-2008-AdG 228254-DARE.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Soil Mechanics Laboratory, Department of Civil Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Athens, Greece

    Aikaterini Ziotopoulou & George Gazetas

  2. University of California at Davis, Davis, CA, USA

    Aikaterini Ziotopoulou

Authors
  1. Aikaterini Ziotopoulou
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  2. George Gazetas
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Aikaterini Ziotopoulou .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Patras, Patras, 26504, Greece

    Michael N. Fardis

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Ziotopoulou, A., Gazetas, G. (2010). Are Current Design Spectra Sufficient for Soil-Structure Systems on Soft Soils?. In: Fardis, M. (eds) Advances in Performance-Based Earthquake Engineering. Geotechnical, Geological and Earthquake Engineering, vol 13. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8746-1_8

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