A New Proxy for Near-Fault Acceleration Pulses and Implications on Inelastic Displacement Ratio

ABSTRACT

This study develops new equations for predicting the constant-strength inelastic displacement ratio (C_R) by considering nonlinear single-degree-of-freedom systems subjected to near-fault ground motions. To this aim, an energy-based parameter, the MEA/MEV ratio, is firstly considered for characterizing the properties of pulse-like records. “MEA” and “MEV” represent the Maximum Energy of the half-cycle pulse in Acceleration and Velocity time histories, respectively. The effects of the MEA/MEV ratio on the C_R spectra are investigated in terms of elastic-perfectly plastic hysteretic behavior. Finally, a simplified equation for estimating the C_R spectra is developed, and its accuracy is evaluated by calculating the error measures.

KEYWORDS:

• Near-fault ground motion
• velocity-pulse
• acceleration pulse
• inelastic displacement ratio
• single-degree-of-freedom system

Acknowledgments

This work was initially conceptualized during the first author’s research stay as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Bristol, and the financial support from the China Scholarship Council is highly appreciated. The computation of non-linear responses of the SDOF systems was performed using the high-performance computing machine (Blue Crystal Phase 3) at the University of Bristol. We sincerely thank the three anonymous reviewers for improving the quality of the manuscript.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

CRediT Authorship Contribution Statement

Zhiwang Chang: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Writing – original draft. Flavia De Luca: Writing – review & editing. Katsuichiro Goda: Writing – review & editing.

Data and Resources

Strong ground motions and supporting data were obtained from the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center database (last accessed August 2016). Lists of the acc-pulse and non-acc-pulse ground motions can refer to the Appendix section in Chang et al. (2019b).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [52178509]; Science & Technology Department of Sichuan Province [2022NSFSC0456, 2021JDTD0012, 2020YJ0077].