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Damage potential of near-fault records: sliding displacement against conventional “Intensity Measures”

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Abstract

The potential of a particular ground accelerogram to inflict damage to asymmetric strongly-inelastic systems is studied in the paper. An idealised analogue, the rigid block with frictional contact on an inclined base, is adopted as the generic representation of such systems. The inclined base (of (a sufficiently steep) angle) is shaken with numerous strong records bearing the effects of forward-directivity and/or fling-step. The accumulated slippage, D, of the block caused by each record is taken as the induced “damage” to the system. The relevance of a variety of ‘Intensity Measures’ of each accelerogram (ranging from PGA and PGV to Housner’s and Arias’ Intensities) in predicting this damage, is investigated statistically. It is shown that only a few of these ‘Intensity Measures’ are reasonably successful and their use could therefore be recommended, but only for statistical inference. A detailed deterministic analysis presented in the paper for one of these successful measures, Arias Intensity, reveals the unacceptably poor predictive power of this measure. Upper-bound curves of slippage provided in closed-form expressions, are an improvement over the state-of-practice Makdisi & Seed diagrams.

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Abbreviations

A(t):

Acceleration time-history

A C1 = α C1 g :

Critical (or yielding) acceleration of the block for sliding downward

A C2 = α C2 g :

Critical (or yielding) acceleration of the block upward

A H :

peak value of the base ground acceleration

A RMS :

square root of the mean of ground acceleration (see Eq. 5)

ASI :

Acceleration Spectrum Intensity (see Eq. 10)

CAV :

Cumulative Absolute Velocity (see Eq. 9)

D(t):

Sliding displacement time-history

D :

Residual (permanent) sliding displacement

D RMS :

square root of the mean of ground displacement (see Eq. 7)

I A :

Arias intensity (see Eq. 3)

I C :

Characteristic intensity (see Eq. 8)

I H :

Housner intensity (see Eq. 4)

M :

Earthquake magnitude

M W :

Moment earthquake magnitude

P D :

Destructiveness Potential Factor (see Eq. 12)

P V :

Modified Destructiveness Potential Factor

PGA :

Peak ground acceleration of ground motion

PGV :

Peak ground velocity of ground motion

PGD :

Peak ground displacement of ground motion

R F :

Site distance from the fault

R 2 :

Correlation coefficient

SMA :

Sustained Maximum Acceleration

SMV :

Sustained Maximum Velocity

T P :

predominant period of ground motion

T mean :

mean period of ground motion (see Eq. 13)

V(t):

velocity time-history

V RMS :

square root of the mean of ground velocity (see Eq. 6)

VSI :

Velocity Spectrum Intensity (see Eq. 11)

β :

angle of the inclined plane measured from the horizontal

ΔV :

maximum velocity step (Bertero et al 1976)

μ :

Coulomb’s constant coefficient of friction

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  1. National Technical University of Athens, Athens, Greece

    Evangelia Garini & George Gazetas

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  1. Evangelia Garini
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  2. George Gazetas
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Correspondence to George Gazetas.

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Garini, E., Gazetas, G. Damage potential of near-fault records: sliding displacement against conventional “Intensity Measures”. Bull Earthquake Eng 11, 455–480 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10518-012-9397-0

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