Detection of pulse-like ground motions based on continues wavelet transform

This paper implements a quantitative approach to detect pulse-like ground motions based on continues wavelet transform, which is able to clearly identify sudden jumps in time history of earthquake records by considering contribution of different levels of frequency. These analyses were performed on a set of time series records obtained in near-fault regions of Iran. Pulse-like ground motions frequently resulted from directivity effects in near-fault area and are of interest in the field of seismology and also earthquake engineering for seismic performance evaluation of structures. The results of this study basically help us to establish a suitable platform for selecting pulse-like records, while performance evaluation of structure in near-fault area will need to account. The period of velocity pulses as a key parameter that significantly affects structural response is simply determined by using a pseudo-period of the mother wavelets. In addition, the efficiency of different types of mother wavelets on classification performance and the features of detected pulse are investigated by applying seven different kinds of mother wavelets. The analyses indicate that the selection of most appropriate mother wavelet plays a significant role in effective extraction of ground motion features and consequently in estimation of velocity pulse period. As a result, the user should be aware of what is selected as a mother wavelet in the analysis. The comparisons given here among different mother wavelets also show the better performance of BiorSpline (bior1.3) basis from biorthognal wavelet families for the preferred purpose in this paper.