Response" is what an object, living or nonliving,

gives to a certain situation. It can be passive

response or active response but it doesn't matter.
What matters is how the buildings respond to
earthquakes. Let us say for an example, you take a
pendulum and you pull it to a certain height and
leave it for free oscillation. What you will see is
the mass attached at the end of the pendulum moving
back and forth constantly, such motion is simple to
understand as it is clearly visible to your eyes.
The time a pendulum takes to complete one
oscillation is called the time period of a pendulum.
This factor, "time period" is very important
characteristic of a building, it can tell you
everything about the building, every ins and outs.
Coming back to pendulum and time period, when you
plot the motion of pendulum with respect to time it
will give you a sinusoidal curve called the response
of the pendulum to the disturbance. It will look
something like this:
Angle describes the angle that a thread makes with
the vertical axis. But here is one catch, do you
see that the peaks are slowly dropping? This
constant drop in the peak or amplitude of the
pendulum shows that there is an energy loss
somewhere along the time frame and it is not
constant, it varies with velocity of the pendulum.
This energy loss is in the form of "damping" of the
structure. Damping is a function of velocity and
the more the velocity, the more will be the damping
force. This damping actually takes energy away from
the system. So is it a good or a bad thing? It is
a good thing for buildings as we do not our building
to stay under constant motion. We want the motion
to stop and damping will help us in doing that.
Higher the damping percentage, the faster the
building will lose energy and it will become
stable.
So I think now you will know the meaning of term
"Response" of the system.

But there are two types of responses, "Forced

response" and "Free response". Free response is the
one when an object moves freely without any
application of external forces. Just similar to our
case of simple pendulum, but in case of forced
vibration, there is a constant application of force
to the system, i.e. constant pumping of energy into
the system. This changes everything and a forced
vibration is the one we are interested in. But a
forced vibration is a complicated process but let
us hold on to that topic and first look through a
term called mode shapes of the system and natural
frequencies of the system.

When I first told you to imagine a swinging

pendulum, what was the first image that popped into
your mind? It is a regular blob of mass swinging
left and right in your grandfather's clock. It is
not difficult to visualize because all the
pendulums in the world swing in the exact same way.
It is called a simple pendulum and the motion you
just visualized is the mode shape of the system. It
has only one mode, because it has only single degree
of freedom. The frequency with which it oscillates
back and forth is called the natural frequency of
the pendulum and it depends on the length of the
pendulum. Thus the shape it follows is called
eigenvector of the system, it will remain constant
no matter what you do, only its magnitude will
change, not its shape. You can test this by applying
different magnitude of force at the bottom of the
pendulum and it will swing faster and harder but it
will never change the shape you imagined. Also the
frequency of the oscillation will also remain
constant. If you push it harder, it will go further
but it will move faster, so it will take exactly
the same time for the pendulum to complete one
cycle. This natural frequency is called the
eigenvalue of the system.

Now imagine the same thing happening with the

building. A building has say 3000 different nodes
and each node will have 6 degrees of freedom. This
means that the structure will have 3000 x 6 = 18000
degrees of freedom which in turn means 18000
different natural frequencies. But we generally
restrict certain degrees of freedom, let us say by
fixing the beams and columns at its ends. But still
it has many different degrees of freedom and called
eigenvalues of the system. Each natural frequency
of the system will have a particular set of
eigenvector associated with it, also know as mode
shape. As shown in image above a simple column can
have different fundamental mode shapes. When a
building shakes then the overall displacement as a
function of time for a particular building can be
divided into these simple mode shapes. We can
actually calculate different mode shapes of the
building by forming the mass matrix and the
stiffness matrix. Now the each mode will have its
participation to the global response of the system.
What do I mean by participation? Suppose in box
there are 30 balls of three colors, 15 of red, 10
of blue and 5 of black. This means that 50% of the
balls are red, thus contribution of red colored
ball is 50 %.

Similarly, in case of a structure, when it vibrates

each mode has its impact on the overall deformation
of the system, some modes impact more than the
others. A mode with the lowest frequency or the
highest time period is the one which impacts the
most. This is called modal mass participation
factor which shows how much a particular mode is
contributing to the overall deformation of the
system.

Now in case of an earthquake, acceleration is fed

into the building from the ground and the building
starts shaking. The building shakes at its own
natural frequencies and not at the frequency of the
earthquake because the building cannot respond to
the force at any other frequency. It is the natural
tendency of the system. So if you take different
buildings and test those buildings for the
earthquake motion, you will get a peak acceleration
at which the building was oscillating. Now these
buildings are of different heights, lengths and
weights so all the buildings will have different
time periods or say natural frequencies. This means
that the building will have its own mode shapes and
its own response rate. So if you plot a graph of
peak acceleration that a building observed along
with the time period of different buildings you
will get a graph like this:
The x-axis shows the time periods of different
building that you tested and the y axis shows the
accelerations that they observed, not the ground
accelerations but the building accelerations. These
building accelerations are called Pseudo Spectral
Accelerations (PSA). Now all the codes have their
own pseudo spectral acceleration (response
spectrum) charts for a specific sight. What you
have to test it, apply this acceleration to your
building story and get the value of building shears.
Why don't we text it for an actual ground motion?

Well you can do that, but a single ground motion

run to takes about 20-24 hours to produce the
results. This is a long time and it is often not a
cost effective method and besides it requires a
very complicated modelling. So to avoid all the
hurdle we assume that the building will essentially
stay elastic and you just check the building base
shear using these pseudo spectral accelerations
after all you are interested in designing for the
maximum response. But again this method is just
limited to small structures. And each code has
defined a building height limit till which you can
use this method. If you want to build any taller
then you will have to perform dynamic analysis of
the structure.

So this was just a basic introduction to the new

blog series we are starting. A new series of blog
posts that will be focused on earthquake analysis
and design of building and we will discuss in depth
about various methods we can use to analyse a
structure for an earthquake.