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Floor acceleration demands in three RC buildings subjected to multiple excitations during shake table tests

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Abstract

Significant attention has been recently paid to the determination of floor acceleration demands used for the design of acceleration-sensitive non-structural components in buildings. This study makes a contribution through the use of experimental shake table data from one 6-storey and two 3-storey reinforced concrete buildings tested at the E-Defense testing facility. All buildings were exposed to multiple excitations, and floor acceleration demands were studied through peak floor accelerations and floor response (acceleration) spectra. The obtained ratios of peak floor to peak ground accelerations confirmed findings from previous studies. The ratio distributions along the height provided in Eurocode 8, ASCE 7-16 and NZS 1170.5 were found to be conservative. Besides the known properties of floor response spectra, the results for two of the buildings revealed that in some cases, spectra can have two prominent peaks corresponding to the fundamental mode period of different damage states or degree of nonlinearity during a single shaking event. A prerequisite for this occurrence, which in this paper is termed the “Elongated Fundamental Mode Effect”, is that due to the characteristics of the input motion, a significant part of the energy is involved both before and after the change of structural response nature, from (mostly) linear elastic to nonlinear. Among others, such change is perceptible through an extension of the fundamental period. The Elongated Fundamental Mode Effect was investigated by using scalograms generated through the Continuous Wavelet Transform, which was found to be an efficient tool for the visualization of energy localization in the time–frequency domain.

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The data presented in this study are available on request from the corresponding author.

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Acknowledgements

The present work is partially supported by the Tokyo Metropolitan Resilience Project of the National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Resilience (NIED). The first author is grateful for the opportunity to participate in the Long-term visiting program organized by the Earthquake Research Institute (ERI), The University of Tokyo, where he spent 4 months working as a Project Researcher.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Technical Sciences, University of Novi Sad, Novi Sad, Serbia

    Vladimir Vukobratović

  2. Earthquake Research Institute, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

    Trevor Zhiqing Yeow & Koichi Kusunoki

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  1. Vladimir Vukobratović
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  2. Trevor Zhiqing Yeow
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  3. Koichi Kusunoki
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Correspondence to Vladimir Vukobratović.

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Vukobratović, V., Yeow, T.Z. & Kusunoki, K. Floor acceleration demands in three RC buildings subjected to multiple excitations during shake table tests. Bull Earthquake Eng 19, 5495–5523 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10518-021-01181-2

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