A Novel Numerical Iterative Procedure for Ground Motion Simulation

Time history analysis of structures require some carefully selected earthquake records to be employed as the input for dynamic analysis. Despite the increase in number of recorded earthquake ground motions, the need for generation of artificial accelerograms are highly demanded in some areas for some reasons. As a result, many efforts have been made to develop mathematical methods for simulating ground motions by various researchers. Since most of the methods for generation of spectrum compatible signals use relatively complex mathematical approaches, it requires engineers to make more effort and spend time to deal with these complicated methods. In order to meet engineers’ demand for generation of the above-mentioned signals while maintaining an applicable tool that is easy to utilize, a simple, numerically iterative novel procedure has been proposed which is based on linear combination of intrinsic mode functions (IMF) of recorded seismic signals evaluated by empirical mode decomposition (EMD). The proposed method requires only basics of structural dynamics and definitely all engineers are familiar with them and simply can apply the method, while it leads to results as accurate and efficient as benchmark methods such as random vibration theory and time-frequency analysis techniques. The results of this study prove the applicability of the developed approach.