Estimation of the Seismically Induced Residual Drift of Structures from Measured Acceleration

Estimating the story drift directly from acceleration records is challenging. This paper presents a systematic integration scheme involving the empirical mode decomposition of signals to estimate the earthquake-induced displacement of buildings, including their permanent deformation after an earthquake. A three-phase algorithm is proposed. In phase-1, the displacement waveform without residual displacement is estimated, then in phase-2 the residual deformation is calculated. Combining both phase-1 and phase-2, the displacement waveform is estimated. Three types of acceleration data, namely, shaking table test data, seismic response data for a building, and near-fault ground motion data, were used to validate the proposed method.