Ground motion records

Ground motion record selection

The main goal of this repository is to develop a global database of fragility and vulnerability functions, and therefore a more general approach to the selection of the ground motion records was explored, as opposed to methodologies that optimise the selection for a specific site (e.g. conditional spectrum method - Baker 2011). In this context, records were selected according to the tectonic environment, magnitude and distance. The accelerograms were collected from several ground motion databases worldwide (e.g. Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research (PEER) NGA-West, Chilean Geological Institute, Colombian Geological Service, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México – Engineering Instituting, European Strong Motion Database) for active shallow and subduction tectonic environments. Over 3500 records with a minimum peak ground acceleration (PGA) of 0.05g were collected

Figure. 1 Location of the recording stations of the selected ground motion records

From the initial catalogue of 3500 ground motion records, around 200 signals were selected for the nonlinear dynamic analyses. For the selection ten bins of acceleration between 0.05 g and >2.0 g were considered, and 20 records were randomly selected from the catalogue for each bin. When the minimum requirement of records per intensity bin was not fulfilled (e.g. in the high intensity range), the records were scaled up to a maximum of 2.0. If after scaling there are still not enough records to comply with the minimum number of records per bin, the selection algorithm continues to the next intensity bin.

References

Baker, J. (2011) Conditional Mean Spectrum: Tool for Ground-Motion Selection. Journal of Structural Engineering, 137(3): p. 322-331. DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)ST.1943-541X.0000215.