Study on equivalent velocity pulse of nearfault ground motions

Introduction By analyzing earthquake motions, we could find that earthquake motions near the causativefault have two characteristics. One is the remarkable directivity effect. The amplitude of thefault-normal component is larger than that of the fault-parallel one; the other is obvious pulse mo-tions. Bertero, et al (1977) studied the earthquake records of the 1971 San Fernando earthquake.They first pointed out that some ground motions recorded near the causative fault is characterizedb…

Study on equivalent velocity pulse of nearfault ground motions

Near-fault strong ground motions that resulted in serious structural damage are characterized by directivity effect and pulse-type motion. Large-amplitude and long-period pulses are contained in the velocity time-history traces of near-fault pulse-type records. A reasonable model of equivalent velocity pulse is proposed on the basis of the ex- isted models in this paper to simplify the calculation and analysis. Based on the large amount of collected near-fault strong earthquakes records, the parameters describing equivalent velocity pulse model such as pulse period, pulse intensity and number of predominant pulses are studied, and comparison is made with the results obtained by others models. The proposed model is contributive to the seismic design for structures in near-fault areas.