Seismic analysis of structural systems subjected to fully non-stationary artificial accelerograms

In seismic engineering, the earthquake-induced ground motion is generally represented in the form of pseudo-acceleration or displacement response spectra. There are, however, situations in which the response spectrum is not considered appropriate, and a fully dynamic analysis is required. In this case, the most effective approach is to define artificial spectrum-compatible stationary accelerograms, which are generated to match the target elastic response spectrum. So a Power Spectral Density (PSD) function is derived from the response spectrum. However, the above approach possesses the drawback that the artificial accelerograms do not manifest the variability in time and in frequency observed from the analysis of real earthquakes. Indeed, the recorded accelerograms can be considered sample of a fully non-stationary process. In this study a procedure based on the analysis of a set of accelerograms recorded in a chosen site to take into account their time and frequency variability is described. In particular the generation of artificial fully non-stationary accelerograms is performed in three steps. In the first step the spectrum-compatible PSD function, in the hypothesis of stationary excitations, is derived. In the second step the spectrum-compatible Evolutionary Power Spectral Density (EPSD) function is obtained by an iterative procedure to improve the match with the target response spectrum starting from the PSD function, once a time-frequency modulating function is chosen. In the third step the artificial accelerograms are generated by the well-known Shinozuka and Jan (J Sound Vib 25:111-128, 1972) formula and deterministic analyses can be performed to evaluate the structural response. Once the EPSD spectrum-compatible function is derived, a method recently proposed by the authors (Muscolino and Alderucci in Probab Eng Mech 40:75-89, 2015), is adopted to evaluate the EPSD response function of linear structural systems subjected to fully non-stationary excitations by very handy explicit closed-form