Evaluation of Seismic Slope Displacements Based on Fully Coupled Sliding Mass Analysis and NGA-West2 Database

Abstract

In this study, two predictive models for seismic slope displacements are developed based on an equivalent-linear fully coupled sliding mass model and 3,714 ground-motion recordings selected from the Next Generation Attenuation (NGA)-West2 database. Both predictive models use the sliding system’s yield acceleration and initial fundamental period Ts as predictor variables, whereas they use different sets of vector intensity measures (i.e., spectral acceleration at a degraded period of the system 1.5Ts and Arias intensity in one model; peak ground acceleration and spectral acceleration at 2 s in another). The models are developed following the framework of model BT7, a predictive model for estimating the sliding displacement based on the fully coupled sliding mass analysis. The framework consists of two parts, namely, the probability of “zero” displacement (<1 cm) and the statistical distribution of “nonzero” displacement (≥1 cm). The proposed models in this study can be regarded as updates of the BT7 model, which can be used for estimating earthquake-induced displacements for a wide range of slope cases.