Pseudo Excitation Method and Its Application in Seismic Design and Disaster Mitigation of Long-Span Structures

Seismic analysis of long-span structures must account for the spatial relative motion of the ground nodes, including the wave passage effect, incoherence effect and the local site effect. A highly efficient and accurate method, known as the Pseudo Excitation Method (PEM), has been developed by the authors, which is very effective in dealing with the above problems because the solution of the above stochastic differential equations of motion has been transformed accurately into the computation of a series of harmonic or transient responses of the structure if the ground acceleration is regarded as a stationary or evolutionary Gaussian random process. Therefore, PEM is not only accurate, efficient, but also very convenient. Practical 3D finite element models with engineering scales up to thousands or higher degrees of freedom can now be computed in minutes on an ordinary personal computer.