A simple approach to integration of acceleration data for dynamic soil–structure interaction analysis

Accumulating experience indicates that direct integration of the ground acceleration data provided for seismic soil–structure interaction analysis often causes unrealistic drifts in the derived displacement. The drifts may have a significant effect on large-scale interaction analysis in which the displacement excitation is required as an input. This paper proposes a simple approach to integration of the acceleration to acquire a realistic displacement–time series. In this approach, the acceleration data is firstly baseline-corrected in the time domain using the least-square curve fitting technique, and then processed in the frequency domain using a windowed filter to further remove the components that cause long-period oscillations in the derived displacement. The feasibility of the proposed approach is assessed using several examples and comparisons are made between the results obtained using the proposed scheme and those using other complicated procedures.