January 2022 Chapter Meeting
Regional-scale seismic risk assessment of building structures using physics-based earthquake simulations
Speaker: Maha Kenawy, PhD | Engineering Consultant | Exponent
When: January 20, 2022 | 6:00 – 7:00 PM
Where: Virtual – Online Link Coming Soon
Engineers have studied the occurrence of earthquakes and their impacts on civil structures for decades. Despite our increased knowledge and level of preparedness for earthquake events, there is significant uncertainty surrounding our understanding of the potential impacts of large and rare earthquakes, for which we do not have sufficient observational data. Such rare events may cause significant damage to structures, and incur substantial economic losses due to interruption of community functions. Because the timely recovery of communities following natural disasters is a national priority, the 2018 U.S. Congress reauthorization of the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program called for improving the seismic safety and recovery standards of critical infrastructure. To achieve this goal, structural engineers must predict the performance of infrastructure under the expected ground shaking in future earthquakes. This seminar will discuss the use of physics-based earthquake fault rupture simulations and high-performance computing tools to assess the expected risks to building structures over entire geographical regions.
Such assessments require highly parallelized simulations, advanced nonlinear modeling techniques to predict extreme limit states of structures, and efficient computational workflows. The regional scale simulations reveal complex spatial variability in the ground shaking intensity and distribution of risk to structures close to the rupturing faults, and underline the impacts of seismic wave propagation patterns, local soil conditions and fault rupture slip distribution on the expected demands on engineered systems. These findings impose several challenges on design engineers, and prompt important questions regarding the appropriate selection of earthquake records for engineering analysis of structures located near active faults. The results of this work provide recommendations and numerical tools to improve the existing guidelines for analyzing and designing earthquake-resistant structures in seismically active areas. Because of the sparsity of field observations of large earthquakes in dense urban areas, this work promises to fill critical gaps in our knowledge of the impacts of earthquakes on engineered systems, and support the preparedness of communities against natural hazards.
MORE INFORMATION COMING SOON