| Abstract: | The square root of the sum of the squares (SRSS) procedure and its modified forms are often used to obtain seismic design response. The design inputs for such procedures are usually defined in terms of pseudo velocity or acceleration response spectra. Erroneous results have been obtained with these existing SRSS procedures, especially in the calculation of responses where high frequency effects dominate. Here an alternative SRSS procedure is developed using the so-called mode acceleration approach of structural dynamics. The design input in this procedure is defined in terms of relative acceleration and relative velocity spectra. The relative spectra can be related to pseudo spectra. For a given number of modes to be included in the analysis the new SRSS rule proposed here will reduce the error due to the so-called ‘missing mass’ effect and predict a more accurate response value than the rules which use pseudo spectra as input, for systems either with or without dominant high frequency mode effects. |
