The Earthquake Engineering Online Archive

An evaluation of seismic energy demand: an attenuation approach

Chou, Chung-Che; Uang, Chia-Ming

PEER-2000/04, Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center, University of California, Berkeley, 2000-02, 96 pages (400/P33/2000-04)

The overall objective of this project is to develop an energy-based procedure as a technical basis for performance-based seismic design and verification. The premise of this approach is that the energy demand to the structure on the basis of the ground motion characteristics such as earthquake magnitude, distance, and site class during an earthquake can be established, and the energy capacity of the structure can be evaluated. The year-one research objective was focused on establishing the inelastic energy demand for a single-degree-of-freedom system. The equivalent velocity (V subscript alpha ) of absorbed energy was proposed as the key parameter for representing inelastic seismic demand. An attenuation model together with a two-stage regression analysis procedure (Boore and Joyner 1993) was used to express (V subscript alpha ) as a function of the earthquake magnitude, source-to-site distance, and site class. In addition, a normalized form of the absorbed energy was considered as an index for energy demand. From the energy perspective, the effect of near-field ground motions was also included in the study.

Available online: http://peer.berkeley.edu/publications/peer_reports/reports_2000/0004.pdf