Comparative study of seismic structural response to real and spectrum matched ground motions

Developing the concept of performance based analysis and design has made nonlinear dynamic analysis an ecient method for quantication of the seismic response of structures. Generally, this analysis is done utilizing accelerograms, which are ground motions obtained from earthquakes. This research is focused on assessing the seismic structural response of a comprehensive set of reinforced concrete moment resisting frames under excitation of real accelerograms and ground motions that are spectrally matched to a target spectrum. The matching process is conducted in the time domain, and the ASCE 7-05 spectrum is used as the target spectrum. Comparisons are provided for a number of ground motion parameters and the eect of spectrum matching has been investigated. Additionally, the variation of structural response and the degree of compatibility and conservation of real and spectrally matched ground motions have been extensively discussed. It is shown that spectrum compatibilization eectively decreases the variation of structural response. However, the measure of observed bias thoroughly depends on the height of the structure. Finally, fragility curves of structural performance are provided and it is indicated that consideration of modeling uncertainties results in obtaining a fragility curve with reasonable resemblance to that obtained from real ground motions.