Structural damage to r.c. buildings located in a near-fault area has been observed during strong ground motions, with long-duration horizontal pulses and high values of the ratio between the peak value of the vertical acceleration and the analogous value of the horizontal acceleration. The design provisions of current seismic codes are generally not very accurate for assessing the structural ef...

Within the past decade, seismic isolation systems have gained rapid popularity in the earthquake resistant design of bridge structures. This popularity has come in response to the inadequacy of earlier seismic design and retrofit methodologies. The mechanical shortcomings and subsequent failure mechanisms associated with the early elastic seismic design philosophy are first presented, followed ...

ground vibrations during an earthquake can severely damage structures and equipments housed in them. many factors including earthquake magnitude, distance from the fault or epicenter, duration of strong shaking, soil condition of the site, and the frequency content of the motion define the properties of ground motion and its amplification. a deep understanding of the effects of these factors on...

The rather moderate sized (magnitude 6.6) Bihar earthquake of August 21, 1988 demonstrated clearly that the Indian Engineering profession is far from prepared for a larger earthquake. During the author's extensive travel within the areas affected by this earthquake, it became clearer that the engineering community should immediately initiate serious and coordinated efforts to prepare for the po...

This paper deals with the optimization of reinforced concrete (RC) structures under earthquake loads by introducing a simple methodology. One of the most important problems in the design of RC structures is the existing of various design scenarios that all of them satisfy design constraints. Despite of the steel structures, a large number of design candidates due to a large number of design var...

In seismic resistance design, the design seismic motion is usually defined by elastic response spectra to reflect the characteristic in frequency. Whilst, either the phase of a reference seismic record or random phase is used in generation of artificial wave. The influence of phase on structural response can not be properly defined, as it is often omitted for linear elastic responses. But for t...

Iran is an active seismic region. Earthquake damage is commonly controlled by three interacting factors including source and path characteristics, local geological and geotechnical conditions and type of the structures. Obviously, all of this would require analysis and presentation of a large amount of geological, seismological and geotechnical data. In this paper, nonlinear geotechnical seismi...