Prediction of input energy spectrum: attenuation models and velocity spectrum scaling

Summary Recent improvements in performance‐based earthquake engineering require realistic description of seismic demands and accurate estimation of supplied capacities in terms of both forces and deformations. Energy based approaches have a significant advantage in performance assessment because excitation and response durations, accordingly energy absorption and dissipation characteristics, are directly considered whereas force and displacement‐based procedures are based only on the maximum response parameters. Energy‐based procedures mainly consist of the prediction of earthquake input energy imposed on a structural system during an earthquake and energy dissipation performance of the structure. The presented study focuses on the prediction of earthquake input energy. A large number of strong‐ground motions have been collected from the Next Generation Attenuation (NGA) project database, and parametric studies have been conducted for considering the effects of soil type, epicentral distance, moment magnitude, and the fault type on input energy. Then prediction equations for input energy spectra, which are expressed in terms of the equivalent velocity ( V eq ) spectra, are derived in terms of these parameters. Moreover, a scaling operation has been developed based on consistent relations between pseudo velocity ( PS V ) and input energy spectra. When acceleration and accordingly velocity spectrum is available for a site from probabilistic seismic hazard analysis, it is possible to estimate the input energy spectrum by applying velocity scaling. Both of these approaches are found successful in predicting the V eq spectrum at a site, either from attenuation relations for the considered earthquake source or from the results of probabilistic seismic hazard analysis conducted for the site. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.