Advanced Time-Frequency Analysis Applications in Earthquake Engineering (2002-2003)

Future design procedures for civil structures, especially those to be protected from extreme and blast related loads, will need to account for temporal evolution of their frequency content. Separate time analysis and frequency analysis by themselves do not fully describe the nature of these nonstationary dynamic loads. In the past few years, significant effort has been devoted to wavelets and time-frequency analysis. This article attempts to briefly present certain techniques which are currently available, and suggests possible applications in the area of earthquake engineering. Further, it gives an outline of current research topics, some preliminary results on earthquake signal representation using time-frequency analysis techniques, and possible future research directions in this area. To comply with the space limitations of this article, only references that are readily available in the form of books are cited.