• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.163-170
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• 2020

Floor acceleration plays a major role in the seismic design of nonstructural components and equipment supported by structures. Large floor acceleration may cause structural damage to or even collapse of buildings. For precision instruments in high-tech factories, even small floor accelerations can cause considerable damage in this study. Six P-wave parameters, namely the peak measurement of acceleration, peak measurement of velocity, peak measurement of displacement, effective predominant period, integral of squared velocity, and cumulative absolute velocity, were estimated from the first 3 s of a vertical ground acceleration time history. Subsequently, a new predictive algorithm was developed, which utilizes the aforementioned parameters with the floor height and fundamental period of the structure as the new inputs of a support vector regression model. Representative earthquakes, which were recorded by the Structure Strong Earthquake Monitoring System of the Central Weather Bureau in Taiwan from 1992 to 2016, were used to construct the support vector regression model for predicting the peak floor acceleration (PFA) of each floor. The results indicated that the accuracy of the predicted PFA, which was defined as a PFA within a one-level difference from the measured PFA on Taiwan's seismic intensity scale, was 96.96%. The proposed system can be integrated into the existing earthquake early warning system to provide complete protection to life and the economy.

• Journal of the Architectural Institute of Korea Structure & Construction
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• v.36 no.3
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• pp.121-128
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• 2020

In this paper, the ASCE 7 equivalent static approach for seismic design of non-structural elements is critically evaluated based on the measured floor acceleration data, theory of structural dynamics, and linear/nonlinear dynamic analysis of three-dimensional building models. The analysis of this study on the up-to-date database of the instrumented buildings in California clearly reveals that the measured database does not well corroborate the magnitude and the profile of the floor acceleration as proposed by ASCE 7. The basic flaws in the equivalent static approach are illustrated using elementary structural dynamics. Based on the linear and nonlinear dynamic analyses of three-dimensional case study buildings, it is shown that the magnitude and distribution of the PFA (peak floor acceleration) can significantly be affected by the supporting structural characteristics such as fundamental period, higher modes, structural nonlinearity, and torsional irregularity. In general, the equivalent static approach yields more conservative acceleration demand as building period becomes longer, and the PFA distribution in long-period buildings tend to become constant along the building height due to the higher mode effect. Structural nonlinearity was generally shown to reduce floor acceleration because of its period-lengthening effect. Torsional floor amplification as high as 250% was observed in the building model of significant torsional irregularity, indicating the need for inclusion of the torsional amplification to the equivalent static approach when building torsion is severe. All these results lead to the conclusion that, if permitted, dynamic methods which can account for supporting structural characteristics, should be preferred for rational seismic design of non-structural elements.