09-10-2014, 03:25 PM
The popular response spectrum technique, in its present form, provides information only about the largest peak response of a structure. However, for the economic reasons, it is common to allow the energy dissipation through inelastic excursions, and this makes the higher order peaks (i.e. second, third, fourth etc.) also important from the seismic damage considerations. The aim of the present study is to propose the distributions of these ordered peaks in the response process by accounting for the statistical dependence between them. Two formulations have been presented, one based on the Markov theory and the other on the joint density of the peaks as obtained from the digital simulation. These formulations have been compared with the histograms obtained from synthetically generated time histories. The peak estimates based on the assumption of independence are compared with those from the proposed formulations to see how good and practical this assumption is. The application of order statistics in ductility and damage studies is illustrated through two probabilistic mod