• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.15-22
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• 2003

Seismic design codes developed taking into account the strong earthquakes may result in unnecessary economical loss in the low seismic area, and the importance of the performance based design considering the soil-structure interaction is recognized for the reasonable seismic design. In this study. elastic and inelastic seismic response analyses of a single degree of freedom system on the soft soil layer were performed considering the nonlinearity of the soil for the 1 weak earthquakes scaled to the nominal peak accelerations of 0.07g and 0.11g. The seismic response analyses were performed in one step applying the earthquake motions to the bedrock, utilizing a pseudo 3-D dynamic analysis software of the soil-structure system. The study results indicated that seismic response spectra of a system assuming the rigid base or the linear soil layer does not represent the true behavior of a structure-soil system, and it is necessary to take into account the nonlinear soil-structure interaction effects and to perform the performance based seismic design for the various soil layers, having different characteristics, rather than to follow the routine design procedures specified in the design codes for the reasonable seismic design. The nonlinearity of the soft soil excited with the weak seismic motions also affected significantly on the elastic and inelastic seismic response spectra of a system due to the nonlinear soil amplification of the earthquake motions, and it was pronounced especially for the elastic response spectra.