Order Statistics of Peaks in Earthquake Response

Abstract

In its present form the response spectrum superposition technique provides only the highest peak of the response at various levels of a multistory structure. For better understanding of the progressing damage as the structure is subjected to successive excursions beyond the design level, and to estimate the number of times certain responses may be exceeded, it is essential to know all the peaks of the response, not just the highest peak. In this paper, a probabilistic theory is presented, using order statistics, to find the expected, the most probable, or with any desired confidence level, the amplitudes of all the local maxima in the random response functions at any point in a multistory structure.