Ground motion record selection based on broadband spectral compatibility

The increasing interest towards performance-based seismic design has promoted research on the improvement of seismic input definition, especially in the framework of displacement-based design and assessment. Within the ongoing research activities to improve the representation of seismic actions in Italy, this study addresses the selection of displacement-spectrum compatible earthquake ground motions from real accelerograms. This involved the definition of a target displacement spectrum for Italian sites, the construction of a suitable strong ground motion database consisting of high-quality accelerograms, and the development of the REXEL-DISP, a software to select record sets compatible with displacement response spectra. The application examples show that searching for displacement-spectrum-compatible accelerograms enables some advantages hardly achievable by more common approaches in terms of spectral acceleration compatibility, that is, limited record-to-record variability also in the case of unscaled records, and easy matching over a broad range of periods.