Modal-Based Ground Motion Selection Method for the Nonlinear Response Time History Analysis of Reinforced Concrete Shear Wall Structures

Abstract

This paper presents a modification of the modal-based ground motion selection (MGMS) method for improving the reliability of the nonlinear response time history analysis (NLRHA) of reinforced concrete (RC) shear wall structures. The original MGMS procedure quantified the impact of frequency content combinations in the time domain (FCCTD) of input ground motions (IGMs) on the seismic response of building structures using the level of interaction of the first three modes induced by IGMs. However, previous research found that the first two modes have far larger modal mass coefficients than those of higher modes and dominate the vibration of the RC shear wall structures with a symmetric plan. Therefore, the MGMS procedure should be modified by employing the interaction of the first two modes induced by IGMs to properly account for the effect of the FCCTD of IGMs on the seismic response of structures. In the MGMS procedure for RC shear wall structures, seven IGMs that caused the most significant interactions of the first two modes were selected from a suite of twenty seed IGMs, which were chosen with a conventional spectra-matching-based IGMs selection procedure for the NLRHA of the structure. A comprehensive case study involving three RC shear walls with different heights was conducted to investigate the capability of the MGMS in selecting suitable IGMs for the NLRHA of RC shear wall structures. Sets of seed IGMs were selected, adopting conditional mean spectra and design spectra as the target spectra. It was found that the seismic demands computed using MGMS selected IGMs can ensure a more reliable and reasonable computation of seismic demands compared with conventional spectra-matching-based IGMs selection methods.