THE SEISMIC RESPONSE OF A PIPING SYSTEM TO NONSTATIONARY RANDOM GROUND MOTION

The response of a piping system having flexible supports to non-statio nary random ground motion is presented. The response is regarded as a Gauss-Markov process. The dynamic resistances offered by the supports are specified in terms of stiffness and damping. The excitations at th e supports are non-stationary filtered white noise processes with filt ers driven by evolutionary white noise representing the bed rock motio n. Several illustrative example problems for a typical piping system a re solved. Also, the response for a particular example obtained by spe ctral analysis in the frequency domain is compared with that obtained by the present method of analysis in order to investigate the relative efficiencies of both methods.