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Introduction

Geotechnical Earthquake
Engineering  Contains

o Introduction.
o Strong ground motion measurement
o Ground motion parameters
Chapter: 3
Strong ground motion

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Introduction Introduction

 Earth is in continuous motion – tremors may vary

o In time from milliseconds to some minutes and  Ground motion can be
described usually by 3
o In amplitude from nanometers to meters.
translational components

 Micro tremors are of importance to seismologists  The ground motion records

(time history records) contain
tremendous amount of
 Design engineers are interested in strong motions. Evaluation information.
of the effects of earthquake at a particular site requires
objective, quantitative ways of describing strong ground
motion.

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Introduction Strong motion measurement

 For engineering purpose, three characteristics of earthquake

motion are of primary significance. They are:  Measurement of strong ground motion is vital for the
identification and evaluation of earthquake parameters
o The amplitude
 Instruments to measure vibrations –
o Frequency content and
 Seismograph – used to measure relatively weak ground
o Duration of motion.
motion and the records they produce is called
seismograms.
 In practice, it is necessary to use more than one of these  Accelerograph – used to measure strong ground motions
parameters to characterize a particular ground motion and the records they produce is called accelerograms.
adequately.

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Strong motion measurement Strong motion measurement

Seismographs: Data acquisition and digitization:

 Early ground motion equipments record the data in analog

form on paper or photographic films
 To use the recorded ground motions for engineering
computations, the data must be digitized – digitization was
performed manually with paper, pencil and engineering scale.

 In recent years, digital seismographs are commonly used.

 They record ground motions continuously at rates of 200 to
1000 samples per sec and saving the data if a triggering
acceleration is exceeded.

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Strong motion measurement Strong motion measurement

INDEX-NUMBER =KK1200410231936G07.EW
Strong motion instrument arrays: Strong ground CHANNEL-NUMBER =31
TOTAL OF CHANNELS =56
motion DATA-NUMBER =13000
 Large earthquakes produce ground motions with different records: DATA-INTERVAL =0.01
ACC-MAX =28.5
characteristics at different sites. OBSERVED-LONGITUDE =138 36.0
OBSERVED-LATITUDE = 37 25.0
 The spatial variation of ground motion is important in both OBSERVED PLACE NAME=KK1
seismology and earthquake engineering. TITLE =G7(TMSL+5.0m) EW
EARTHQUAKE-ORIGIN
LONGITUDE =138 49.46
LATITUDE = 37 13.02
MAGNITUDE =5.3
 Networks of seismometers are known as strong motion arrays. DEPTH =10.97
EPICENTRAL-DISTANCE=30
 World wide and regional arrays – useful for studying ORIGIN-TIME =2004 10 23 19 36 00.00
LOCATION =MID NIIGATA PREF
earthquake mechanisms and spatial distribution of many DATA-FORMAT =(10F8.3)
important earthquake parameters. DATA-STARTING-TIME =2004 10 23 19 36 25.00
DATA-UNIT =Gal
 Local or dense array – useful for studying spatial
0.088 0.035 -0.072 -0.118 -0.072 0.027 0.134 0.126 0.012 -0.041
distribution information on smaller area and below the -0.057 -0.110 -0.026 0.111 0.157 0.096 -0.041 -0.110 -0.087 0.004
0.043 -0.003 -0.003 0.004 -0.019 0.012 0.012 -0.034 -0.019 -0.026
ground surface -0.041 0.043 0.073 0.058 0.043 -0.019 -0.072 -0.026 0.027 0.081
0.088 0.004 -0.041 0.004 0.020 0.012 0.027 0.004 -0.026 0.058
SMS 2012 0.081 0.043 0.012 -0.057 -0.064 0.050 0.043 -0.049 -0.019 -0.041 SMS 2012

Ground motion parameters Ground motion parameters

Amplitude parameters:
 Essential for describing the important characteristics of strong
ground motion in compact, quantitative form.  Typically only one of these
 Many parameters have been proposed to characterize the quantities is measured directly –
amplitude, frequency content and duration of strong ground the others computed from it by
motion – some describing only one of these characteristics integration or differentiation.
while others may reflect two or three.  Predominant frequencies of
acceleration, velocity and
 Amplitude parameters displacements are different.
 The most common way of describing a ground motion is with  Acceleration - high frequency
a time history components
 The motion parameter may be  Velocity – less high frequency
o Acceleration, components than acceleration
o Velocity,  Displacement – relatively low
o Displacement or all three. frequency components.
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Ground motion parameters

Amplitude parameters:
 Useful parameters for characterization of ground motion
amplitudes are –
o Peak acceleration
o Peak velocity and
o Peak displacement

Peak acceleration:
 Most commonly used parameter
 PHA (Peak hor. acc.) – the maximum absolute value of
horizontal acceleration obtained from the accelerogram.
 HA have commonly been used to describe ground motions
because of their natural relationship to inertial forces.
 PHA can also be correlated to earthquake intensity.
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Ground motion parameters Ground motion parameters

Amplitude parameters: Amplitude parameters:
Peak acceleration:
 PVA is given less attention because the margins of safety Peak velocity:
against gravity induced static vertical forces usually provide  Since velocity is less sensitive to higher frequency
adequate resistance to dynamic forces induced by vertical components, the PHV is more likely to characterize ground
accelerations during earthquakes. motion amplitude accurately at intermediate frequencies.

 Ground motion with high peak accelerations are generally Peak displacement:
more destructive than with lower peak accelerations.  Peak displacements are generally associated with the lower
frequency components of an earthquake motion.
 Although peak acceleration is a very useful parameter, it  Difficult to determine accurately due to signal processing
provides no information on the frequency content or duration errors in the filtering and integration of accelerograms and
of the motion, so must be supplemented by additional due to long period noise.
information to characterize a ground motion accurately.  So it is less commonly used parameter

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Ground motion parameters Ground motion parameters

Frequency content parameters: Frequency content parameters:
 Ground motion spectra: Fourier Spectra -
 Dynamic response of structures is very sensitive to frequency  A plot of Fourier amplitude versus frequency is called
at which they are loaded. Fourier amplitude Spectrum, a plot of Fourier phase angle
 Earthquakes produce complicated loading with components versus frequency is Fourier phase spectrum.
of motion that span a broad range of frequencies.
 Fourier series can be used to express any periodic function as .
 Frequency content describes how the amplitude of a ground
motion is distributed among different frequencies.

 Characterization of the motion is not complete without

 The Fourier amplitude spectrum of a strong ground motion
considering its frequency content, as it strongly influence the
shows the distribution of amplitude of motion with respect to
effect of the motion.
frequency – hence it expresses the frequency content of a
motion very clearly.
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Ground motion parameters

Frequency content parameters:

 Fourier amplitude spectrum may be -

o Narrow: it implies that the motion has dominant
frequency, which can produce a smooth, almost
sinusoidal time history.
o Broad: it implies that the motion contains a variety of
frequencies that produce more jagged, irregular time
history. Fourier
2 2 transform of
Fourier X     xt  cost dt    xt sin t dt 
T T

    any function
amplitude 0  0 
x(t) is:
T  
 xt sin  t dt 
Phase 1  0
angle      tan  T


X     xt e
 i t
dt
  xt  cos  t dt  
 0 
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Corner
frequency
Cut off
frequency
Ground motion parameters
Frequency content parameters:
 Power Spectra -
 Frequency content of a ground motion can also be described
by a power spectrum or power spectral density function.

 Total intensity of a ground motion of duration Td is given in

time domain by the area under the time history of squared
acceleration

Corner frequency – theoretically proportional to the cube root of seismic

moment – large earthquake produce greater low-frequency motions

Cutoff frequency - not well understood. Characterize both as a near site

effect and as a source effect - usually assumed to be constant for a given
geographic region.
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Ground motion parameters

Frequency content parameters:
 Response Spectra -
 Most extensively used spectra in earthquake engineering
practice.
 The response spectrum describes the maximum response of a
SDOF system to a particular input motion as a function of the
natural frequency and damping ratio of the SDOF system.
 The shapes of typical response spectra indicate that peak
spectral acceleration, velocity and displacement values are
associated with different frequencies.
 At low frequencies – avg spectral displacement is nearly
constant
 At high frequencies – avg spectral acceleration is fairly constant.

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Ground motion parameters Ground motion parameters

Frequency content parameters: Frequency content parameters:
 Spectral parameters -
 Band width:
 A number of parameters have been proposed to extract
 It is the range of frequency over which some level of
important pieces of information from the above spectra.
Fourier amplitude is exceeded.
 Predominant period /frequency:  It is usually measured at the level where the power of the
 Period / frequency of vibration corresponding to the spectrum is half its maximum value; this corresponds to a
maximum value of the Fourier amplitude spectrum. level of 1/√2 times the max Fourier amplitude.
 It is determined more easily for smoothed spectra.
 To get more accurate
value of predominant
period avoiding the
undue influences, the
spectrum should be
smoothed.

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Ground motion parameters Ground motion parameters

Frequency content parameters: Duration:

 Vmax/amax:  Duration is related to time required for release of

accumulated strain energy by rupture along the fault – as
 It is related to the frequency content of the motion because
the area / length of fault rupture increases, the time
peak velocity and peak accelerations are usually associated
required for rupture increases
with motions of different frequencies.
 As a result, the duration of strong motion increases with
increasing earthquake magnitude.
Duration:

 Can have a strong influence on earthquake damage.  Accelerogram contains all accelerations from the time the
 Short duration - may not produce enough load reversals for earthquake begins until the time the motion has returned
damaging response to build up in structure, even if the to the level of background noise.
amplitude is high  For engineering purposes, only the strong motion portion
 Long duration – can produce enough load reversals to cause of accelerogram is of interest.
substantial damage even with moderate amplitude.
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Ground motion parameters Ground motion parameters

Duration: Other ground motion parameters:
 Different approaches have been  A single parameter that includes the effect of the amplitude
taken to evaluate the duration of and frequency content of a strong motion record is the rms
strong motion in an acceleration.
accelerogram.
 Bracketed duration (Bolt, 1969):
time between the first and last
exceedances of a threshold
acceleration usually 0.05g.

Where Td is the duration of strong motion, λo is the intensity( mean

squared acceleration)

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Estimation of ground motion parameters Estimation of ground motion parameters

Magnitude and distance effect:

 Estimation of ground shaking – estimation of ground

motion parameters are essential for proper design of
earthquake resistant structures.

 Predictive relationships which express a particular ground

motion parameter in terms of the quantities that affect it
most strongly, are used to estimate it

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Estimation of ground motion parameters Estimation of ground motion parameters

Estimation of amplitude parameters: Estimation of frequency content parameters:

 Predictive relationships for parameters (peak acceleration  Frequency content of the ground motion is related to the
and peak velocity) that decrease with increasing distance earthquake magnitude – Large earthquake produce larger
are often referred to as attenuation relationships. and longer period ground motions than the small
earthquakes do.

 As seismic waves travel away from a fault, their higher

frequency components are scattered and absorbed more
rapidly than their lower frequency components – frequency
content also changes with distances
Predominant period:
 The aspect of change in frequency content with distance
involves the shifting of peak of Fourier amplitude
spectrum to lower frequencies / higher periods –
predominant period increases with increase in distance.
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Estimation of ground motion parameters Spatial variation of ground motions

Estimation of frequency content parameters:

 Local variation of ground motion can be important for

certain types of structures like bridges, pipelines etc which
extends over considerable distances.

Spatial variation / incoherence

can be caused by number of
factors like
1. Travelling wave / wave passage
effect: non vertical waves reach
different points on the ground
surface at different times
producing a time shift between
the motions at those points.

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Spatial variation of ground motions

2. A cause of incoherence in the
nearfield is the extended source
effect, in which differences in
the relative geometry of the
source and sites produce
different time shifts and
consequently different motions
at the sites. End of chapter 3

3. Ray path effects: caused by

scattering (reflection, refraction
etc) of waves by
inhomogeneities along the
travel path.

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