Correlation between strong motion durations and damage measures of concrete gravity dams

Strong motion duration affects the cumulative damage of structures significantly. There are more than 30 different definitions of strong motion duration. This study describes numerically, the interdependency between several different definitions of strong motion duration and structural accumulated damage indices, and the aim is to determine the definitions of strong motion duration that exhibit the strongest influence on structural damages. For this purpose, 20 as-recorded accelerograms with a wide range of durations, which are modified to match a 5% damped target spectrum, are considered in this study, and several different definitions of strong motion duration, such as significant duration, bracketed duration and uniform duration are proposed for measuring these durations. On the other hand, nonlinear seismic analyses of concrete gravity dams subjected to earthquake motions with different strong motion durations are conducted according to the Concrete Damaged Plasticity (CDP) model including the strain hardening or softening behavior. Peak displacement, local damage index, global damage index and damage energy dissipation are established for characterizing the influence of strong motion duration on the dynamic response of concrete gravity dams. The degree of the interrelationship between strong motion durations and damage measures is provided by correlation coefficients. Comparison of the correlation between the different durations of the ground motion and different damage measures reveals that strong motion durations calculated from different definitions have no significant influence on damage measure based on the peak displacement response of the dam, but are positively correlated to the accumulated damage measures such as the local damage index, global damage index and damage energy dissipation for events with similar response spectrum.