Wave dynamic analysis of the seismic response of a reinforced concrete building

This paper evaluates the response of the seven-story instrumented building, Holiday Inn Hotel, during the 1994 Northridge earthquake through the wave propagation dynamic analysis. The building has been instrumented during other earthquakes, the most important of these was the 1971 San Fernando earthquake, where the building was located only 22 [km] from the epicenter and didn't showing structural damage. From the accelerograms analysis is detected the propagation of Rayleigh and soil waves in the building, where the first has a polarized particle motion on a vertical plane and the second has a coupled particle motion in the horizontal plane. Both waves impose their frequencies to the building response, whose fundamental frequency (1.4 [Hz] according to ambient vibration test) is less than the frequencies of the identified waves. Due to the impact that these observations have in the seismic design of buildings, as a first attempt, a simple method is proposed to estimate the drift produced by the propagation of a Rayleigh wave in buildings.