SECED 2015 was a two-day conference on Earthquake and Civil Engineering Dynamics that took place on 9-10th July 2015 at Homerton College, Cambridge.
This was the first major conference to be held in the UK on this topic since SECED hosted the 2002 European Conference on Earthquake Engineering in London.
The conference brought together experts from a broad range of disciplines, including structural engineering, nuclear engineering, seismology, geology, geotechnical engineering, urban development, social sciences, business and insurance; all focused on risk, mitigation and recovery.
SECED 2015 featured the following keynote speakers (affiliations correct at the time of the conference):
SECED allows the self-archiving of the Author Accepted Manuscripts (AAM) from the SECED 2015 Conference. This means that all authors can make their conference paper available via a green open access route. The full text of your paper may become visible within your personal website, your institutional repository, a subject repository or a scholarly collaboration network signed up to the voluntary STM sharing principles. It may also be shared with interested individuals, for teaching and training purposes at your own institution and for grant applications (please refer to the terms of your own institution to ensure full compliance).
To deposit your AAM, please adhere to the following conditions:
SECED allows authors to deposit their AAM under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial International Licence 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0). The deposit must clearly state that the AAM is deposited under this licence and that any reuse is allowed in accordance with the terms outlined by the licence. To reuse the AAM for commercial purposes, permission must be sought by contacting seced@ice.org.uk. For the sake of clarity, commercial usage would be considered as, but not limited to:
Should you have any questions about our licensing policies, please contact seced@ice.org.uk.

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The time-dependent wavelet-based mean instantaneous period (MIP) is used as a numerical tool to characterize the time-varying frequency content of typical far-field recorded earthquake ground motions (GMs) and to probe into the hysteretic response of reinforced concrete (r/c) yielding structures. It is shown that the MIP captures well the temporal change of the average frequency content of GMs towards lower frequencies by considering the MIPs of 20 scenario earthquake GMs derived using two different wavelet families. It is further argued that the MIP can be viewed as a generalization of the Fourier-based mean period Tm widely used to characterize the stationary/average frequency content of GMs. This argument is based on the observation that temporal averaged MIPs lie reasonably close to Tm for judicially defined harmonic wavelet bases. Moreover, MIPs of acceleration response signals are examined derived from incremental dynamic analysis applied to a hysteretic oscillator representing a benchmark 12-storey r/c frame for the above suite of GMs. It is observed that the response signal MIPs tend to converge to the GM MIP in a point-wise manner as stronger inelastic behaviour is exhibited. Further, it is shown that the slope of the ensemble average MIP for the near-collapse limit state lies close to the ensemble average GM MIP, while it may also be treated as indicator of the so-called “period elongation” phenomenon for degrading inelastic structures. Overall, the reported numerical data evidence the potential of the slope of the MIP as a record selection criterion accounting for the influence of the time-varying frequency content of GMs to structural response within the performance-based earthquake engineering framework.