Seismic response distribution estimation for isolated structures using stochastic response database

Seismic isolation systems decouple structures from ground motions to protect them from seismic events. Seismic isolation devices have been implemented in many full-scale buildings and bridges because of their simplicity, economic effectiveness, inherent stability, and reliability. It is well known that the most uncertain aspect for obtaining the accurate responses of an isolated structure from seismic events is the seismic loading itself. It is needed to know the seismic response distributions of the isolated structure resulting from the randomness of earthquakes when probabilistic designing or probabilistic evaluating an isolated structure. Earthquake time histories are useful and often an essential element for designing or evaluating isolated structures. However, it is very challenging to gather the design and evaluation information for an isolated structure from many seismic analyses. In order to evaluate the seismic performance of an isolated structure, numerous nonlinear dynamic analyses need to be performed, but this is impractical. In this paper, the concept of the stochastic response database (SRD) is defined to obtain the seismic response distributions of an isolated structure instantaneously, thereby significantly reducing the computational efforts. An equivalent model of the isolated structure is also developed to improve the applicability and practicality of the SRD. The effectiveness of the proposed methodology is numerically verified.