Critical excitation for elastic–plastic structures via statistical equivalent linearization

Since earthquake ground motions and their effects on structural responses are very uncertain even with the present knowledge, it is desirable to develop a robust structural design method taking into account these uncertainties. Critical excitation approaches are promising and a new random critical excitation method for single-degree-of-freedom (SDOF) elastic–plastic structures is proposed. The power (area of power spectral density (PSD) function) and the intensity (magnitude of PSD function) are fixed and the critical excitation is found under these restrictions. In contrast to linear elastic structures, transfer functions and related simple expressions for response evaluation cannot be defined in elastic–plastic structures and difficulties arise in describing the peak responses except elastic–plastic time-history response analysis. Statistical equivalent linearization is utilized to estimate the elastic–plastic stochastic peak responses approximately. The critical excitations are obtained for two examples and compared with the corresponding recorded earthquake ground motions.