Earthquake performance simulation

Earthquake performance simulation is meant to study effect of earthquakes on building structures and is a practical way of seeing a thing to happen without it actually taking place in the same way.

Physical simulation of earthquake performance of two building models.

Physical earthquake performance simulation

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Print-screen of a computational earthquake performance simulation.

The best way to do it is to put the structure on a shake-table that simulates the seismic loads and watch what may happen next (if you have no time to stand out in the field and wait for a real earthquake to strike, of course). The earliest experiments like this were performed more than a century ago.[1]

Computational earthquake performance simulation

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Another way is to evaluate the earthquake performance analytically. The very first earthquake simulations were performed by statically applying some horizontal inertia forces, based on scaled peak ground accelerations, to a mathematical model of a building.[2] With the further development of computational technologies, statics approaches began to give way to dynamics ones.[3]

References

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  1. Omori, F. (1900). Seismic Experiments on the Fracturing and Overturning of Columns. Publ. Earthquake Invest. Comm. In Foreign Languages, N.4, Tokyo.
  2. Lindeburg, Michael R.; Baradar, Majid (2001). Seismic Design of Building Structures. Professional Publications. ISBN 1888577525.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  3. Clough, Ray W.; Penzien, Joseph (1993). Dynamics of Structures. McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0070113947.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)

Other websites

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