An investigation on the maximum earthquake input energy for elastic SDOF systems

Energy-based seismic design of structures has gradually become prominent in today's structural engineering investigations because of being more rational and reliable when it is compared to traditional force-based and displacement-based methods. Energy-based approaches have widely taken place in many previous studies and investigations and undoubtedly, they are going to play more important role in future seismic design codes, too. This paper aims to compute the maximum earthquake energy input to elastic single-degree-of-freedom (SDOF) systems for selected real ground motion records. A data set containing 100 real ground motion records which have the same site soil profiles has been selected from Pacific Earthquake Research (PEER) database. Response time history (RTH) analyses have been conducted for elastic SDOF systems having a constant damping ratio and natural periods of 0.1 s to 3.0 s. Totally 3000 RTH analyses have been performed and the maximum mass normalized earthquake input energy values for all records have been computed. Previous researchers' approaches have been compared to the results of RTH analyses and an approach which considers the pseudo-spectral velocity with Arias Intensity has been proposed. Graphs of the maximum earthquake input energy versus the maximum pseudo-spectral velocity have been obtained. The results show that there is a good agreement between the maximum input energy demands of RTH analysis and the other approaches and the maximum earthquake input energy is a relatively stable response parameter to be used for further seismic design and evaluations. © 2019 Techno-Press, Ltd