Response of Simple Beam to Spatially Varying Earthquake Excitation

Abstract

It may be important to consider the effect of the spatial variation of strong ground motion when determining the dynamic response of spatially extended structures. In this paper an empirical space‐time earthquake ground motion model is used to characterize the correlation between the two support motions in a simply supported beam, and the resulting stochastic response of the beam is analyzed. In addition, the responses resulting from some commonly used specialized forms of support motion correlations are also analyzed. A reasonably accurate approximate technique, which simplifies numerical integrations, is proposed for the quick evaluation of beam responses.