Abstract: Earthquake-induced sliding displacement is an important parameter for seismic design of earth structures. Using a novel ground motion selection method, we select and modify ground motions from a strong motion database to capture the median, standard deviation and correlations of response spectra of an earthquake scenario, making it an effective method to incorporate ground motion variability into dynamic time-history analysis of earth structures. Using the selected ground motions and a simple analytical model, the statistical properties of permanent sliding-displacement of earth structures were studied under various earthquake scenarios. The study revealed the influence of structural periods and yielding coefficients of the sliding interface on the statistical distributions of the earthquake-induced sliding displacements. Finally, a model is proposed for the sliding probability and sliding displacements of earth structures conditioned on various earthquake magnitude and rupture scenarios and different fundamental periods. It is demonstrated that the ground motion selection method can effectively represent ground motion variability of different earthquake scenarios. The results have important implications in performance-based earthquake design of earth structures.

Key words: ground motion selection, earthquake scenario, earth structures, earthquake-induced sliding displacement