Proposed guidelines for synthetic accelerogram generation methods

With the advent of high speed digital computation machines and discrete structural analysis techniques, it has become attractive to use synthetically generated accelerograms as input in the seismic design and analysis of structures. Several procedures are currently available which can generate accelerograms which match a given design response spectra while not paying significant attention to other properties of seismic accelerograms. This paper studies currently available artificial time history generation techniques from the standpoint of various properties of seismic time histories consisting of: response spectra; peak ground acceleration; total duration; time dependent enveloping functions defining the rise time to strong motion, duration of significant shaking and decay of the significant shaking portion of the seismic record; Fourier amplitude and phase spectra; ground motion parameters and apparent frequency with the aim of providing guidelines of the time history parameters based on historic strong motion seismic records