Abstract

Abstract In earthquake engineering area, the critical excitation method is an approach to find the most severe earthquake subjected to the structure. However, given some earthquake constraints, such as intensity and power, the critical excitations have spectral density functions that often resonate with the first modes of the structure. This paper presents a non-stationary critical excitation that is capable of exciting the main modes of the structure using a non-uniform power spectral density (PSD) that is similar to natural earthquakes. Thus, this paper proposes a new method to estimate the power and intensity of earthquakes. Finally, a new method for the linear seismic design of structures using a modified non-stationary critical excitation is proposed. Key Words random vibration; critical excitation; spectral density function; non-stationary input