Abstract

Abstract Nowadays it is very necessary to generate artificial accelerograms because of lack of adequate earthquake records and vast usage of time-history dynamic analysis to calculate responses of structures. According to the lack of natural records, the best choice is to use proper artificial earthquake records for the specified design zone. These records should be generated in a way that would contain seismic properties of a vast area and therefore could be applied as design records. The main objective of this paper is to present a new method based on wavelet theory to generate more artificial earthquake records, which are compatible with target spectrum. Wavelets are able to decompose time series to several levels that each level covers a specific range of frequencies. If an accelerogram is transformed by Fourier transform to frequency domain, then wavelets are considered as a transform in time-scale domain which frequency has been changed to scale in the recent domain. Since wavelet theory separates each signal, it is able to generate so many artificial records having the same target spectrum. Keywords: wavelet theory; artificial accelerogram; target spectrum; frequency content.