The Earthquake Engineering Online Archive

Analysis of Earth Motion Accelerograms

Jenschke, Victor A.; Clough, Ray W.; Penzien, Joseph

UCB/SESM-1964/01, Dept. of Civil Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, 1964-01, 170 pages (500/C23/64/01)

The objective of this 1964 dissertation was to study ways of characterizing measured ground motion accelergrams with an emphasis on the fact that maximum dynamic structural response is of primary concern. The study examines three different characterizations, (1) the response spectra which characterizes ground motions from the viewpoint of their effects on a single-degree-of-freedom linear system, (2) the Fourier spectra which characterizes ground motions according to their resolution into harmonic functions which have a continuous frequency distribution and (3) the power spectral density function which is based on a probabilistic approach assuming ground motions as stationary, ergodic, Gaussian process.

Available online: http://nisee.berkeley.edu/documents/SEMM/SEMM-64-01.pdf (10 MB)