Method to generate artificial earthquake accelerations with time domain enhancement and attenuation characteristics

To satisfy the requirements of performance-based design methods for a large number of earthquake signals that contain a series of variable random variables, the generation of artificial seismic ground motion is necessary. To statistics amplitudes’ instability in the time domain, 500 recorded earthquakes have been divided into 5 groups by D5-95 durations and are statistically analyzed. For each D5-95 earthquake group, its standard time-domain enhancement-attenuation process is described as the edge envelope curve, and the representativeness of the curve is valued as the coverage rate. Comparing response spectrums before and after multiplying with edge envelopes functions of 6000 initial artificial earthquakes that are generated by inverse Fourier process with different intensities and D5-95 durations, their spectrums are well-matched. This newly proposed method is proven to be able to generate artificial earthquake signals that resemble natural amplitudes and time-domain characteristics and maintain the desired frequency domain response.