Drain groups in liquefiable soil

One of the major concerns for engineers in seismically active regions is the prevention of damage caused by earthquake-induced soil liquefaction. Vertical drains can aid dissipation of excess pore pressures both during and after earthquakes. Drain systems are designed using standard design charts based around the concept of a unit cell, assuming each drain is surrounded by more drains. It is unclear how predictable drain performance is outside that unit cell concept, for example, drains at the edge of a group. Centrifuge testing is a logical method of performing controlled experiments to establish the efficacy of vertical drains. Centrifuge testing is used to identify the effect of drains dealing with very different catchment areas. The importance of this is further highlighted by the results of a test where the same drains have been modified so that each should behave as a unit cell. It is shown that drains with large catchment areas perform more poorly than unit cells, and also have a knock-on detrimental effect on other drains. Copyright © 2011, IGI Global.

EEFIT mission to Haiti following the 12th January 2010 earthquake

The Mw= 7.2 Haiti earthquake of 12th January 2010 caused extensive damage to buildings and other infrastructure in the epicentral region in and around Port-au-Prince. The Earthquake Engineering Field Investigation Team (EEFIT), which is based in the United Kingdom, organised a field mission to Haiti with the authors as the team members. The paper presents the geotechnical findings of the team including those relating to soil liquefaction and lateral spreading and discusses the performance of buildings, including historic buildings, and bridges. Unprecedented use was made of damage assessments made from remote images (i. e. images taken from satellites and aircraft) when planning the post-earthquake relief effort in Haiti and a principal objective of the team was to evaluate the accuracy of such assessments. Accordingly, 142 buildings in Port-au-Prince were inspected in the field by the EEFIT team; damage assessments had previously been made using remote images for all these buildings. On the basis of this survey, the tendency of remote assessments to underestimate damage was confirmed; it was found that the underestimate applied to assessments based on oblique images using the relatively new technique of Pictometry, as well as those based on vertical images, although to a lesser degree. The paper also discusses the distribution of damage in Port-au-Prince, which was found to be strongly clustered in ways that appear not to have been completely explained. © 2012 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

Excess pore pressures around underground structures following earthquake induced liquefaction

Underground structures located in liquefiable soil deposits are susceptible to floatation following an earthquake event due to their lower unit weight relative to the surrounding saturated soil. This inherent buoyancy may cause lightweight structures to float when the soil liquefies. Centrifuge tests have been carried out to study the excess pore pressure generation and dissipation in liquefiable soils. In these tests, near full liquefaction conditions were attained within a few cycles of the earthquake loading. In the case of high hydraulic conductivity sands, significant dissipation could take place even during the earthquake loading which inhibits full liquefaction from occurring. In the case of excess pore pressure generation and dissipation around a floating structure, the cyclic response of the structure may lead to the reduction in excess pore pressure near the face of the structure as compared to the far field. This reduction in excess pore pressure is due to shear-induced dilation and suction pressures arising from extensile stresses at the soil-structure interface. Given the lower excess pore pressure around the structure; the soil around the structure retains a portion of this shear strength which in turn can discourage significant uplift of the underground structure. Copyright © 2012, IGI Global.

Dynamic models of piled foundations

The vibration behavior of piled foundations is an important consideration in fields such as earthquake engineering, construction, machine-foundation design, offshore structures, nuclear energy, and road and rail development. This paper presents a review of the past 40 years' literature on modeling the frequency-dependent behavior of pile foundations. Beginning with the earliest model of a single pile, adapted from those for embedded footings, it charts the development of the four pile-modeling techniques: the "dynamic Winkler-foundation" approach that uses springs to represent the effect of the soil; elasticcontinuum-type formulations involving the analytical solutions for displacements due to a subsurface disk, cylinder, or other element; boundary element methods; and dynamic finite-element formulations with special nonreflecting boundaries. The modeling of pile groups involves accounting for pile-soil-pile interactions, and four such methods exist: interaction factors; complete pile models; the equivalent pier method; and periodic structure theory. Approaches for validating pile models are also explored. Copyright © 2013 by ASME.

The rocking response of large flexible structures to earthquakes

The rocking response of structures subjected to strong ground motions is a problem of 'several scales'. While small structures are sensitive to acceleration pulses acting successively, large structures are more significantly affected by coherent low frequency components of ground motion. As a result, the rocking response of large structures is more stable and orderly, allowing effective isolation from the ground without imminent danger of overturning. This paper aims to characterize and predict the maximum rocking response of large and flexible structures to earthquakes using an idealized structural model. To achieve this, the maximum rocking demand caused by different earthquake records was evaluated using several ground motion intensity measures. Pulse-type records which typically have high peak ground velocity and lower frequency content caused large rocking amplitudes, whereas non-pulse type records caused random rocking motion confined to small rocking amplitudes. Coherent velocity pulses were therefore identified as the primary cause of significant rocking motion. Using a suite of pulse-type ground motions, it was observed that idealized wavelets fitted to velocity pulses can adequately describe the rocking response of large structures. Further, a parametric analysis demonstrates that pulse shape parameters affect the maximum rocking response significantly. Based on these two findings, a probabilistic analysis method is proposed for estimating the maximum rocking demand to pulse-type earthquakes. The dimensionless demand maps, produced using these methods, have predictive power in the near-field provided that pulse period and amplitude can be estimated a priori. Use of this method within a probabilistic seismic demand analysis framework is briefly discussed. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.

Variation of modal parameters of pile-supported structures in seismically liquefiable soils.

This paper presents experimental results that aimed to investigate the effects of soil liquefaction on the modal parameters (i.e. frequency and damping ratio) of pile-supported structures. The tests were carried out using the shaking table facility of the Bristol Laboratory for Advanced Dynamics Engineering (BLADE) at the University of Bristol (UK) whereby four pile-supported structures (two single piles and two pile groups) with and without superstructure mass were tested. The experimental investigation aimed to monitor the variation in natural frequency and damping of the four physical models at different degrees of excess pore water pressure generation and in full-liquefaction condition. The experimental results showed that the natural frequency of pile-supported structures may decrease considerably owing to the loss of lateral support offered by the soil to the pile. On the other hand, the damping ratio of structure may increase to values in excess of 20%. These findings have important design consequences: (a) for low-period structures, substantial reduction of spectral acceleration is expected; (b) during and after liquefaction, the response of the system may be dictated by the interactions of multiple loadings, that is, horizontal, axial and overturning moment, which were negligible prior to liquefaction; and (c) with the onset of liquefaction due to increased flexibility of pile-supported structure, larger spectral displacement may be expected, which in turn may enhance Pdelta effects and consequently amplification of overturning moment. Practical implications for pile design are discussed.

An experimental and numerical investigation into the seismic performance of a multi-storey concentrically braced plan irregular structure

In this investigation, the seismic torsional response of a multi-storey concentrically braced frame (CBF) plan irregular structure is evaluated numerically and experimentally through a series of hybrid tests. CBF structures have become popular in seismic design because they are one of the most efficient types of steel structures to resist earthquake loading. However, their response under plan irregular conditions has received little focus mostly in part
due to their complex behaviour under seismic loading conditions. The majority of research on the seismic response of plan irregular structures is based purely on numerical investigations. This paper provides much needed experimental investigation of the seismic response of a CBF plan irregular structure with the aim of characterising the response of this class of structure. The effectiveness of the Eurocode 8 torsional effects provision as a method of designing for
low levels of mass eccentricity is evaluated. Results indicate that some of the observations made by purely numerical models are valid in that; torsionally stiff structures perform well and the stiff side of the structure is subjected to a greater ductility demand compared to the flexible side of the structure. The Eurocode 8 torsional effects provision is shown to be adequate in terms of ductility and interstorey drift however the structure performs poorly
in terms of floor rotation. Importantly, stiffness eccentricity occurs when the provision is applied to the structure when no mass eccentricity exists and results in a significant increase in floor rotations.

A statistical analysis of loss factor to determine the energy losses

Given that the total amount of losses in a distribution system is known, with a reliable methodology for the technical loss calculation, the non-technical losses can be obtained by subtraction. A usual method of calculation technical losses in the electric utilities uses two important factors: load factor and the loss factor. The load factor is usually obtained with energy and demand measurements, whereas, to compute the loss factor it is necessary the learning of demand and energy loss, which are not, in general, prone of direct measurements. In this work, a statistical analysis of this relationship using the curves of a sampling of consumers in a specific company is presented. These curves will be summarized in different bands of coefficient k. Then, it will be possible determine where each group of consumer has its major concentration of points. ©2008 IEEE.

Improved ground motion intensity measures for reliability-based demand analysis of structures

In Performance-Based Earthquake Engineering (PBEE), evaluating the seismic performance (or seismic risk) of a structure at a designed site has gained major attention, especially in the past decade. One of the objectives in PBEE is to quantify the seismic reliability of a structure (due to the future random earthquakes) at a site. For that purpose, Probabilistic Seismic Demand Analysis (PSDA) is utilized as a tool to estimate the Mean Annual Frequency (MAF) of exceeding a specified value of a structural Engineering Demand Parameter (EDP). This dissertation focuses mainly on applying an average of a certain number of spectral acceleration ordinates in a certain interval of periods, Sa,avg (T1,…,Tn), as scalar ground motion Intensity Measure (IM) when assessing the seismic performance of inelastic structures. Since the interval of periods where computing Sa,avg is related to the more or less influence of higher vibration modes on the inelastic response, it is appropriate to speak about improved IMs. The results using these improved IMs are compared with a conventional elastic-based scalar IMs (e.g., pseudo spectral acceleration, Sa ( T(¹)), or peak ground acceleration, PGA) and the advanced inelastic-based scalar IM (i.e., inelastic spectral displacement, Sdi). The advantages of applying improved IMs are: (i ) "computability" of the seismic hazard according to traditional Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Analysis (PSHA), because ground motion prediction models are already available for Sa (Ti), and hence it is possibile to employ existing models to assess hazard in terms of Sa,avg, and (ii ) "efficiency" or smaller variability of structural response, which was minimized to assess the optimal range to compute Sa,avg. More work is needed to assess also "sufficiency" and "scaling robustness" desirable properties, which are disregarded in this dissertation. However, for ordinary records (i.e., with no pulse like effects), using the improved IMs is found to be more accurate than using the elastic- and inelastic-based IMs. For structural demands that are dominated by the first mode of vibration, using Sa,avg can be negligible relative to the conventionally-used Sa (T(¹)) and the advanced Sdi. For structural demands with sign.cant higher-mode contribution, an improved scalar IM that incorporates higher modes needs to be utilized. In order to fully understand the influence of the IM on the seismis risk, a simplified closed-form expression for the probability of exceeding a limit state capacity was chosen as a reliability measure under seismic excitations and implemented for Reinforced Concrete (RC) frame structures. This closed-form expression is partuclarly useful for seismic assessment and design of structures, taking into account the uncertainty in the generic variables, structural "demand" and "capacity" as well as the uncertainty in seismic excitations. The assumed framework employs nonlinear Incremental Dynamic Analysis (IDA) procedures in order to estimate variability in the response of the structure (demand) to seismic excitations, conditioned to IM. The estimation of the seismic risk using the simplified closed-form expression is affected by IM, because the final seismic risk is not constant, but with the same order of magnitude. Possible reasons concern the non-linear model assumed, or the insufficiency of the selected IM. Since it is impossibile to state what is the "real" probability of exceeding a limit state looking the total risk, the only way is represented by the optimization of the desirable properties of an IM.