This paper discusses the critical role of transportation systems in disaster recovery and the development of any long-term economic effects from earthquakes, based on insights from the Kobe earthquake and other disasters. The occurrence of long-term effects on regional economies has been controversial in the disaster literature and are for the most part ignored in earthquake loss estimation mod...

Most instruments used in seismological practice to record ground motion are pendulum seismographs, velocigraphs, or accelerographs. In most cases it is assumed that seismic instruments are only sensitive to the translational motion of the instrument’s base. In this study the full equation of pendulum motion, including the inputs of rotations and tilts, is considered. It is shown that tilting th...

The use of flexible roof diaphragms is very common in the United States, both for residential buildings and large-scale commercial buildings. Due to its simplicity, the traditional diaphragm design method is commonly used in diaphragm design, in particular for the design of diaphragms with relatively small dimensions. The traditional diaphragm design method assumes the axial chord forces develo...

Reduced dimensionality representation of strong ground motion records as a superposition of a relatively small number of pulses is studied. Such representation is obtained by the expansion of velocity in orthogonal wavelet series using the Fast Wavelet Transform, and approximation by only the largest energy terms in the series. The Coiflet 5 wavelet family is used, which is orthogonal, smooth a...

The Dependable Computing Systems Lab (DCSL) comprises students (graduate and undergraduate), post-doctoral researchers, and programming staff members within the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Department of Computer Science, and two institute-wide centers – CERIAS (The Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security) and NSF supported NEEScomm (Network...

This paper briefly reviews the development of earthquake resistant design of buildings. The state-of-the-art of seismic design is discussed from the viewpoint of the performance criteria of buildings. These are (a) serviceability from frequent minor-intensity earthquake motions, (b) repairability from an infrequent but major-intensity earthquake motion, and (c) life safety from the maximum poss...

The pattern of energy release during the Imperial Valley, California, earthquake of 1940 is studied by analyzing the El Centro strong motion seismograph record and records from the Tinemaha seismograph station, 546 km from the epicenter. The earthquake was a multiple event sequence with at least 4 events recorded at El Centro in the first 25 seconds, followed by 9 events recorded in the next 5 ...

Physical modeling of earthquake generation processes is essential to further our understanding of seismic hazard. However, the scale-dependent nature of earthquake rupture processes is further complicated by the heterogeneous nature of the crust. Despite significant advances in the understanding of earthquake generation processes, and the derivation of underlying physical laws, controversy rema...