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Numerical Synthesis Method of Ground Motions for Seismic Design of Near-Fault Bridge
Engineering
1 2 3
Shuanglan Wu ; Bhuddarak Charatpangoon ; and Junji Kiyono
1
Earthquake and Lifeline Laboratory, Dept. of Urban Management, Kyoto Univ., C1-2-146,
Kyoto-Daigaku Katsura, Nishikyo-ku, Kyoto, Japan, P.O. Box 615-8540. E-mail:
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wu.shuanglan.73v@st.kyoto-u.ac.jp
2
Dept. of Civil Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Chiang Mai Univ., 239, Huay Kaew Rd.,
Muang District, Chiang Mai, P.O. Box 50200. E-mail: bhuddarak@hotmail.com
3
Graduate School of Global Environmental Studies, Kyoto Univ., C1-2-137, Kyoto-Daigaku
Katsura, Nishikyo-ku, Kyoto, Japan, P.O. Box 615-8540. E-mail: kiyono.junji.5x@kyoto-u.ac.jp

ABSTRACT
Spatially extended long-span bridges, which crossing an active fault or located near fault area
are subjected to both static step-like deformation and dynamic ground motions. Due to there are
lack of near-fault recordings, numerical simulations of near fault time-histories are required. This
paper proposes a hybrid synthesis method combining the modified statistical Green’s function
and theoretical Green’s function. It considers both the dynamic vibration and static terms
(namely permanent displacement) of the near-fault strong ground motion, also the simulation
simply considered the complete seismic waveforms including the near-, intermediate-, and far-
field terms. Then by this synthesis method, near-fault ground motions are calculated as the input
time-histories to analyze seismic response of a simple bridge. The results well showed the
applicable of this method provides a useful reference for seismic design guidelines for near-fault
bridge engineering.

INTRODUCTION
At recent decades, a number of significant inland earthquakes tragically occurred
successively, such as the 1994 Northridge, California, the 1995 Kobe, Japan, 1999 Jiji, Taiwan
earthquakes, and the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake. These seismic events had devastating effects
on urban infrastructures, especially the fault cross the bridge or very near the bridges. For
example, during the 1999 Jiji earthquake, Taiwan, the strong earthquake induced the surface
rupturing in horizontal and vertical direction of 3~9m, and caused large collapse and failure in
the near-fault or the faulting crossing bridges as the Fig. 1 (Yingxin, H. et al., 2014) showing. As
for the near-fault ground motion, it features the fling effects and the impulsive in velocity, and
the fling-containing time histories are required when conducting dynamic time-history analysis
for bridge engineering located in proximity to potential faults (typically up to 15-20 km) (Kamai,
R., et al. 2014), to properly account for the near-source ground motions containing near-source
effects. While up to date, the effects of near-fault ground motion on structures were
underestimated, and very few studies have addressed this problem. A rational seismic design
philosophy for bridges crossing active faults or located near the fault has not been established
yet. Also due to there are very few existing earthquake records that contain fling effects, the
numerical techniques generating reliable ground motions appropriate for the engineering to
design spatially extended structures is required. Thus, in this paper, it proposed a simple
synthesis hybrid method combining the statistical Green’s function and theoretical Green’s
function for simulating the near-fault ground displacements.

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Figure 1. The destructive and collapse of bridges near-source (Yingxin, H. et al. 2014)
SYNTHESIS PROCEDURE OF NEAR-FAULT GROUND MOTION
As Mavroeidis, G. P. (2003) mentioned, an estimate of static, dynamic and total permanent
displacements are required in the near-fault ground motions to decouple permanent-translation
pulse from directivity pulse. In terms of the simulated time histories, a broad range of fault types
(e.g. strike-slip, normal or reverse faulting), to characterize motions is highly required, as well as
variable slip and full kinematic description of the rupture process. Thus, the ground motions of
short distance to source cannot be neglected. We here proposed a hybrid method that combines
modified statistical Green’s function dynamic and theoretical Green’s function for calculating
the dynamic and static terms, respectively, to simulate the near-fault strong ground motions.
Modified statistical Green’s function: The basic idea of the statistical Green’s function
method is: a large earthquake is composed of a series of small earthquakes; records of small
earthquakes or statistically calculated small earthquakes are selected properly as ground response
caused by small areal sources, namely statistical or empirical Green’s functions which are then
overlaid by specified cracking ways to obtain the time-history curve of large earthquake. And
Eq. (1) listed the main procedure, and more details can be checked in papers Irikura, K. (1983),
Kamae et al. (1991), and Irikura, K. and Miyake, H. (from web site: http://kojiro-
irikura.jp/pdf/Workshop_irikura.pdf.), (Irikura 1986) and Fig. 2. Even if the distance to fault is
very short, the dynamic ground motion can be calculated by superposing small element
waveforms. As the original statistical Green’s function method, proposed by Kamae et al.
(1991), in which only the far-field S-waves from the stochastic point source (Boore 1983) are
superposed on an extended fault plane using the empirical Green’s function technique (Irikura
1986). While, in this paper, in order to introduce the near-, intermediate-, and far-filed waves to
obtain the complete waveforms of near-fault ground motions, based on the method proposed by
Astushi. N. (2006), the conventional stochastic Green’s function method, through using the
ration of Fourier transform of total wave, is applied for calculating the dynamic terms.

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NL NW  ( ND 1) n '
  NL NW r0
  
r0 1
U (t )  u (t  tmn )  u (t  tmn k  )  u '(t  tmn ) (1)
r
m 1 n 1 mn  k 1
n' ( ND  1)n '  m1 n 1 rmn

observation point

vs
rmn
subfault
(small fault)
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(m,n) r0
main fault (large fault)
vr
W
ξmn
rupture propagation

startiing point of rupture

L
Figure 2. Schematic illustrations of statistical Green’s Function method
Theoretical Green’s function: Based on the proposed method by Hisada (1994, 1995, 1997,
2002, 2003, 2005), an efficient method for computing near-fault ground motions in a layered
half-space, an efficient method for carrying out the fault Integration of the representation
theorem as the following Equation (2):
U k (Y ;  )   {Tik ( X , Y ;  )  Tiks ( X , Y )}Di ( X ; )d    Tiks ( X , Y ) Di ( X ; )d  (2)
 

U (Y ;  )   T ( X , Y ) Di ( X ;  )d 
s
k
s
(3)
 ik

where Tik and Tiks is the traction Green’s function at circular frequency, ω and static (ω=0)
traction Green’s function of the layered half-space, Di is the i-th component of the fault slip.
It should be well noted that in this study, we only calculate the second terms, Eq. (3),
(namely the static terms) to get the static displacements. Details can be obtained from Hisada’s
works (1994, 1995, 1997, 2002, 2003, 2005).
Combination of statistical and theoretical Green’s function: As the statistical Green’s
function method does not consider the static displacement, and the theoretical Green’s function
for generation of dynamic motion is a lack of general versatility although the method is very
sophisticated, in order to obtain near-fault time history, we proposed a hybrid method using
modified statistical and theoretical Green’s function for synthesizing near-fault ground
displacement. Further, it is much faster when compared with some other simulation methods.

APPLICATION OF PROPOSED METHOD ON BRIDGE

For the purpose of adoption, this proposed method in this paper; the synthesis method was
applied to analyses the seismic response of a simplified bridge with four-span which cross a
surface fault.
Bridge model: As for this dynamic response of structures analysis, first, we give the
simplified model of three-degree-of-freedom system as shown in Fig. 3a and the near-fault
model of reverse faulting is shown in Fig. 3b. Our main purpose is to check the seismic response
of linear behavior of the simplified bridge model. Thus, we can summarize the equations above
to the matrix formations in Eq. (4), and the Newmark method is used to solve Eq. (4).
[M ]{u}  [C]{u}  [ K ]{u}  [ D]{z}  [S ]{z}  {0} (4)
And the structural parameters in these analyses are shown in Table 1 and Table 2.

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Figure 3. The structural system near the fault (unit: m)

Table 1. Structural parameters of this system
i mass 1 mass 2 mass 3
mass: mi (t/sec2/m) 0.6 0.4 0.6
I(1,2or 3) x y z x y z x y z
damping: di (t/sec/m) 4 3 5 2 1 3 4 3 5
spring: ki (t/m) 4000 3000 2000 4000 3000 2000 4000 3000 2000
L: (m) 100 100 100

Table 2. Structural parameters of this system

0 1 2 3
j
x y z x y z x y z x y z

spring:
3000 2000 1000 3000 2000 1000 3000 2000 1000 3000 2000 1000
sj
damping:
3 2 1 3 2 1 3 2 1 3 2 1
cj
Note: the unit of spring is (t/m), and (t/sec/m) for damping.

Input ground motions: By using the proposed method on near-field ground motions, we
finial get the time histories of input in velocities and displacements from points 0 to 4 for three
directions as the Figs. 4-5 showing. It can be easily seen the hanging-wall effects (the points 0
and 1 are located on the footwall, and the results are smaller than the hanging wall observation
points 2-4), the impulsive velocity, and non-zero permanent displacements.

ANALYSIS RESULTS
As the limitation of the space, here we just checked the seismic response of velocity and
displacements of the three mass as Figs. 6-7 showing respectively. The different input caused
large differences in response of velocities and displacement, and the response of velocity show
large values under the excitation of static displacement, and the displacements of each mass also
results in non-zero values, which should be carefully considered with different time histories
when conducting the seismic analysis or bridge design.

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Figure 4. Time histories of input velocities

Figure 5. Time histories of input displacements

CONCLUSION
In this paper, we have done the researches and obtained the following conclusions:
(1) A hybrid method combined statistical Green’s function method and theoretical Green’s
function was proposed to simulate the displacement of near field ground motion, which
synthesized the static and dynamic terms.
(2) By using this method, the near-fault ground motions (velocities and displacements) were
calculated as input velocity and displacements for a simple near-fault bridge model. The
strong ground motion well showed the features of near-fault ground motions: the hanging
wall effects, the impulsive effects and non-zero displacements.

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(3) The bridge model located near fault exhibits large response values, especially under the
input containing impulsive static terms, which should be carefully considered when
designing bridge.
Based on the results, the proposed method can be employed to simulate near-fault
displacements.
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Figure 6. The time history of response velocity

Figure 7. The time history of response displacement

DISCUSSION
As this proposed method considers only a simple combination of dynamic term by adoption
of statistical Green’s function method, and static term using theoretical Green’s function method,
and analyzed the seismic response of four spans bridges, while some other factors need further

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study.
1) The dynamic parts of near-field ground motion, like multi-faults, time delay, different
types of slip velocity, slip distribution and multi-time windows, and have to be
considered in the future research.
2) Much more observation points and the geometrical conditions with multi-layers must be
taken into consideration, and comparisons between the simulated and observed results are
needed to verify the accuracy of this method.
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3) As for the seismic analysis of bridges, such as different spans and types, and structural
parameters need further consideration, also comparisons with the experiments.
4) A concrete synthesis method of ground displacement for bridge design also needs further
clarifying.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Authors referred the program of theoretical Green’s function developed by Prof. Hisada,
Kogakuin University, which is opened on his web-site. This work was supported by Grant-in-
Aid for Scientific Research (A) (principal investigator: Junji Kiyono, Kyoto university). This
research also gets support from Doyu-Daichi Company. The authors express their gratitude here.

REFERENCES
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earthquakes”. Bull. Disas. Prev. Res. Inst., 33, pp. 63-104.

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9 (in Japanese)
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