Health Assessment Methods (HAM) and Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) aim to improve the standard of knowledge regarding the safety and maintenance of structures and infrastructure acquiring information about geometrical, mechanical and dynamical characteristics of structures. In earthquake-prone areas, this activity has the double aim of assessing the buildings structural integrity and extrac...

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...

This paper examines four methods by which ground motions can be selected for dynamic seismic response analyses of engineered systems when the underlying seismic hazard is quantified via ground motion simulation rather than empirical ground motion prediction equations. Even with simulation-based seismic hazard, a ground motion selection process is still required in order to extract a small numbe...

This paper presents a framework for seismic vulnerability assessment based on Bayesian Networks. This framework incorporates the HAZUS model, the demand model and the capacity model, which are used to calculate the probabilities of earthquake-induced bridge damage. The framework is here applied to ‘twin’ bridges that are correlated with the demand model and the capacity model. The paper investi...

Most of oil and gas offshore platforms are located in the seismic regains. So, Seismic vulnerability evaluation of the offshore platforms is one of the most important and vital issues in the structural systems. In this study, jacket type offshore platforms are studied by incorporating the pushover analyses and nonlinear time history analyses, in such a way that, first some push over analyses ar...

The α Cen binary system is a well-known stellar system with very accurate observational constraints to structure of its component stars. In addition to the classical non-seismic constraints, there are also seismic constraints for the interior models of α Cen A and B. These two types of constraint give very different values for the age of the system. While we obtain 8.9 Gyr for the age of the sy...

Probabilistic seismic risk assessments (PSRA) are used to quantify the seismic damage probability of complex engineering structures due to seismic events. In such systems, the seismic capacities of individual relevant components are determined by structure mechanics. A significant digits computation method to quantify the mean seismic failure probability (fragility) for given component capacity...

Disaster risk reduction has become a global urgent need. Similarly to other natural hazards, earthquakes may cause significant damages on a large scale. In Europe, seismic events mainly affect historical city centers, which are characterized by dense urban structure, usually constituted by ancient masonry and pre-code R.C. buildings, often in aggregate sequence. Historical city centers are very...

Simplified procedures are commonly employed to estimate seismic displacements of earth and waste fills. The landmark work of Makdisi and Seed (1978) has been widely adopted in practice. Although this work is widely used, it has a number of significant limitations such as decoupling the sliding block analysis from the seismic response analysis, use of a limited number of recorded earthquake moti...

The paper describes an integrated approach to seismic hazard assessment, which was applied for the Taiwan region. First, the theoretical seismic catalogue (2001-2050) for the Taiwan region had been calculated using the 4D-model (location, depth, time) for dynamic deformation of the Earth’ crust and 5D-model (location, depth, time, magnitude) for seismic process. The models were developed on the...