Uncertainty quantification of seismic structural response due to randomness in the soil properties

This work investigates how the uncertainty in the soil parameters influences the frequency content of the earthquake accelerograms that are expected to occur at a specific site. To this end, the Clough-Penzien power-spectrum is parametrized using random variables to describe the stochastic soil parameters and an artificial set of accelerograms is generated using the Spectral-Representation method. Subsequently, the equations of motion of a single degree-of-freedom oscillator are solved numerically for each earthquake scenario and the response spectrum is extracted. By comparing the derived response spectrum with the one obtained from considering deterministic soil parameters, useful conclusions are drawn pertaining to structural design and analysis.