The primary goal of this project was to develop strategies for selecting standardized sets of ground motions for use by the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center’s Transportation Research Program. The broad research activities of the Transportation Research Program require ground motions for use in a variety of applications, including analysis of structural and geotechnical systems at locations throughout California (or other active areas where seismic hazard is dominated by mid- to large-magnitude crustal earthquakes at near to moderate distances). The systems of interest may be sensitive to excitation at a wide range of periods, and some sites of interest may have the potential to experience near-fault directivity pulses. A unique aspect of this project is that these are not
structure-specific and site -specific goals, so many ground motion selection techniques developed in previous research efforts are not directly applicable here.
This report summarizes the approaches that were developed to meet these goals and describes the properties of the ground motion sets that were selected. To develop some of the ground motion sets, a new selection algorithm is proposed that allows the user to select a set of ground motions whose response spectra match a target mean and variance; this new algorithm is also described. The project thus provides several useful sets of standardized ground motions, as well as a new approach to select alternate sets to meet user-specific needs.
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