Revolutionary changes which have taken place in the USA over the past 50 years in earthquake engineering as applied to transportation structures (highway bridges, and transit and high-speed rail aerial structures) are reviewed, giving emphasis to seismic design criteria, characterization of seismic ground motions, dual strategy of seismic design, modelling and dynamic analysis, assessment of se...

The Baraza Slide is located in the northwestern Alboran Sea, between 590 and 830 m water depth, and its morphology, seismic facies and sedimentary structure are analyzed based on multibeam bathymetry and very high to medium resolution single-channel seismic records. During the Pleistocene and Late Quaternary this landslide has undergone repeated slope failures characterized by a succession of t...

Dijkstra’s single-source shortest path algorithm has been applied in seismic tomography to determine paths of minimum travel time from all locations in a 3D earth model to sensors used in seismic experiments. An iterative data parallel algorithm is formulated for seismic tomography based on the Bellman-Ford-Moore (BFM) algorithm. Performance is demonstrated for OpenMP and OpenCL.

This paper presents the effects of geometry of sediment bedrock interface (GSBI) of 3D basins with a circular outcropping free surface on the characteristics and the focusing of the basin-generated surface (BGS) waves and associated spatial variations of the average spectral amplification (ASA) and average aggravation factor (AAF). An increase of ASA towards the centre of the semispherical (SS-...

Lithologic, faunal, seismic, and isotopic evidence from the Blake Nose (subtropical western North Atlantic) links a massive release of biogenic methane approximately 55.5 million years ago to a warming of deep-ocean and high-latitude surface waters, a large perturbation in the combined ocean-atmosphere carbon cycle (the largest of the past 90 million years), a mass extinction event in benthic f...

Seismic rehabilitation provides existing buildings with more resistance to seismic activity, ground motion, or geotechnical failure due to earthquakes. Performance-based rehabilitation is a general concept through which the retrofitting criteria are defined regarding to performance objectives when the structural and nonstructural members are subject to different levels of earthquake hazards. In...

Setback in elevation of a structure is a special irregularity with considerable effect on its seismic performance. This paper addresses multistory Reinforced Concrete (RC) frame buildings, regular and irregular in elevation. Several multistory Reinforced Concrete Moment Resisting Frames (RCMRFs) with different types of setbacks, as well as the regular frames in elevation, are designed according...

The main aim of this study, is to evaluate the seismic reliability of steel concentrically braced frame (SCBF) structures optimally designed in the context of performance-based design. The Monte Carlo simulation (MCS) method and neural network (NN) techniques were utilized to conduct the reliability analysis of the optimally designed SCBFs. Multi-layer perceptron (MLP) trained by back propagati...

It is known that the seismic response of a structural system is highly influenced, in addition to the earthquake input, by the dynamic characteristics of the system itself. This paper presents an approach for the identification of the characteristics of the structural system resisting to horizontal loads which enables to satisfy given seismic performance objectives. This is achieved by consider...