Input-signal characterization for shaking-tables

A large worldwide earthquake data-bank is available for numerical and experimental response analyses of base-excited structural systems. Most of these accelerograms are stored in their uncorrected form and this is appropriate and convenient since they must be differently processed for different engineering applications. Record processing is a necessary step toward the use of recorded data in numerical simulations: it deletes spurious low and high frequency content, introduced in detection, acquisition, storage and digitalization of the signal. Moving from numerical to experimental analyses, the testing machine acts as a filter and, hence, the processing could be no longer required. The paper tries to investigate this aspect.