After the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan, whether structural safety of power plant (NPP) can be guaranteed under an earthquake has been wide concern. Automatic seismic trip systems (ASTS) have deployed NPPs. There are generally two units or more double on one NPP site, and vibration energy structure certainly affect its adjacent structures through soil, there is transfer conversion between...

The paper outlines a probabilistic basis for the automatic estimation from observed surface wave dispersion of structural model parameters with uncertainties. Given an earth model, a wave type and pertinent parameter values, the group velocity of seismic waves can be computed from theory as a function of frequency. Such a function may also be based on the dynamic spectrum representation of an e...

Abstract This paper presents a three–dimensional linear numerical model for the dynamic and seismic analysis of pile-supported structures that allows to represent simultaneously structures, pile foundations, soil profile incident waves that, therefore, takes directly into account structure–pile–soil interaction. The use advanced Green’s functions behaviour layered soils, not only leads very com...

Cities are among the most fragile biological settlements due to their complex internal structure and the influence by different variables. Given the realities of these settlements, in the event of devastating events such as earthquakes, these cities are definitely more fragile; consequently, returning to normal life seems to be much longer and costly. Therefore, considering the importance of th...

Cities are among the most fragile biological settlements due to their complex internal structure and the influence by different variables. Given the realities of these settlements, in the event of devastating events such as earthquakes, these cities are definitely more fragile; consequently, returning to normal life seems to be much longer and costly. Therefore, considering the importance of th...

The Christchurch Women's Hospital, completed in March 2005, is the only base-isolated building in the South Island of New Zealand. The displacement capacity of the base-isolation system and the superstructure ductility capacity are designed to meet 2000-year return-period demands. Detailed structural evaluations after the 2010 Darfield Earthquake revealed damage only to sacrificial non-structur...

Ultra-Wideband (UWB) sensors exploit very weak electromagnetic waves within the lower microwave range for sounding the objects or processes of interest. The interaction of electromagnetic waves with matter provides interesting options to gain information from a great deal of different scenarios. To mention only a few, it enables the assessment of the state of building materials and construction...

Transient gravity changes are expected to occur at all distances during an earthquake rupture, even before the arrival of seismic waves. Here we report on the search of such a prompt gravity signal in data recorded by a superconducting gravimeter and broadband seismometers during the 2011 Mw 9.0 Tohoku-Oki earthquake. During the earthquake rupture, a signal exceeding the background noise is obs...

This paper presents some recent developments in computer simulations and visualization for geotechnical earthquake engineering. In particular, presented are developments centered on soil–foundation–structure (SFS) interactions modeling using the finite element method. The soil–foundation–structure interaction is one of the most challenging problems in earthquake engineering. The computability o...