Dynamic Instability of Soil-SDOF Structure Systems under Far-Fault Earthquakes

A parametric study is devoted to investigating the dynamic instability of soil-structure systems under far-fault earthquakes. The superstructure and soil are simulated as a bilinear single-degree-of-freedom (SDOF) oscillator and based on the cone model concept, respectively. The results show that soil flexibility makes the system dynamically more unstable and that as the non-dimensional frequency increases, the collapse strength-reduction factor highly decreases. Moreover, increasing the aspect ratio leads to a lower collapse strength-reduction factor. However, its effect is found to be negligible. The effects of vibration period and post-yield slope on the collapse strength-reduction factor are the same as on the fixed-base condition. Additionally, comparison of collapse strength-reduction factors resulting from exact time history analyses with those proposed in FEMA 440 for the fixed-base condition shows a great underestimation with errors larger than 20% at approximately all cases and 60% at extreme cases. Finally, a formulation is calibrated using nonlinear regression analysis in order to estimate collapse strength-reduction factors of soil-structure systems.