Evaluation of Nonlinearity and equivalent methods on site response analysis

Earthquake occurred, in the past two decades, have demonstrated the site conditions play a prominent role in the earthquake characteristics at ground surface. Non-Linear Method (NLM) and Equivalent Linear Method (ELM) can usually model the non-linearity soil behavior. This paper summarized a series of the results attained from the site analysis using the non-linear and the equivalent linear method. A set of the soil data was entered into the two computer codes which were developed based on the above two approaches. The shear wave velocity was measured by empirical equation. The results of the two methods were compared. Numerical results achieved by the two approaches have been shown that the values computed by the equivalent linear method are significantly more even in compare with the acceleration scaled. Consequently, it cannot capture the nonlinearity soil behavior well.