Seismic Response Analysis of Shear Buildings Using Waves

A method of using waves instead of modes for analyzing the seismic response of buildings is presented. Instead of using the general procedure of response spectra to quantify the seismic hazard of a building a wave response function is used. An important aspect of this approach is that the wave model can describe building response using only four parameters namely, the stiffness, wave speed, time delay, and normalized distance and are shown to be enough to describe the full building response. The method presented is limited to responses due to ground motions from earthquakes and the building response to be predominately in shear. The wave analysis method proposed can be used for variable structure stiffness with uniform and non-uniform damping cases. Comparison using response spectra for a typical shear building is presented and discussed. The strength of the wave function approach is that it provides more information about the response of the specific shear buildings than the response spectra approach. As one of the findings from the analysis using waves is that the maximum strain in a shear building with variable stiffness and non-zero damping is related to the maximum velocity of the ground motion and not the maximum acceleration.