This is a collaborative research project centered around a strong- motion instrumentation project currently undertaken by Taiwan's Central Weather Bureau (CWB) to install 1,000 digital strong-motion stations on the island (approximately 60% free-field and 40% structural installations). This recent development opens up new possibilities to fundamentally change the way building strong- motion data are collected, analyzed, and disseminated and offers new opportunity for site response study for seismic microzonation using the free-field and down-hole strong-motion data. To fully exploit the potential of the new systems, a three-way cooperative research program is proposed that involves the University of Houston, the University of Southern California, and the National Taiwan University. The objectives are (1) to develop a real-time strong-motion building data processing and analysis methodology to be implemented on the new PC-based system, (2) to develop a methodology for fast system identification to be implemented on the PC-based system to generate engineering data not routinely available at present, and (3) to improve methods of site response prediction for microzonation using existing array data and the data expected from the CWB free-field and down-hole arrays in Taiwan. This project focuses on structural issues as identified in items (1) and (2) above. Special attention is placed on developing system identification and damage assessment techniques which are made more automatic based on advanced software and expanded data base. This cooperative research program uses the already funded seismic instrumentation systems as a testing ground to develop new ways of strong-motion data utilization, thus expanding the usefulness of strong-motion free-field and structural response data. The results of research can be readily applied to the U.S. and the cooperation will also provide the larger U.S. research and engineering community with tiUVa. cEVeeV //
