An Earthquake Response Spectrum Method for Linear Light Secondary Substructures

The earthquake response spectrum is the most popular tool in the seismic analysis and design of structures. In the case of combined Primary-Secondary (P-S) systems, the response of the supporting P substructure is generally evaluated without considering the S substructure, which in turn is only required to bear displacements and/or forces imposed by the P one (“cascade” approach). In doing so, however, the dynamic interaction among P and S components is neglected, and the seismic-induced response of the S substructure may be heavily underestimated or overestimated. In this paper, a novel CQC (Complete Quadratic Combination) rule is proposed for the seismic response of linear light S substructures attached to linear P substructures. The proposed technique overcomes the drawbacks of the cascade approach by including the effects of dynamic interaction and different damping in the substructures directly in the cross-correlation coefficients. The computational effort is reduced by using the eigenproperties of the decoupled substructures and only one earthquake response spectrum for a reference value of the damping ratio.