The increasing interest in performance-based earthquake engineering (PBEE) is further emphasizing the need for more accurate estimates of large deformations under increasingly higher levels of seismic excitation. In this regard, meshfree methods offer a number of advantages towards this goal. In a pilot effort to introduce and promote use of meshfree methods in geotechnical earthquake engineering, an open-source software RKPM2D-EQ is developed and presented herein. This software is developed under the reproducing kernel particle method (RKPM)-based meshfree framework (i.e., RKPM2D). Compared to conventional mesh-based methods, RKPM provides a number of attractive features, such as arbitrary order of continuity and discontinuity, relaxed tie between the quality of the discretization and the quality of approximation, simple h-adaptive refinement, and ability to embed physics-based enrichment functions, among others. The RKPM2D-EQ software builds-on and extends earlier RKPM2D (Huang et al. 2019) efforts with the following additional capabilities: 1) dynamic analysis, 2) material (soil) nonlinear elasto-plastic modeling, 3) periodic boundary, 4) large-strain analysis module, and 5) multi-zone material representation. Using the new RKPM2D-EQ, illustrative scenarios including earthdam and shallow foundation response under strong earthquake loading conditions are presented. These scenarios demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of the newly developed RKPM2D-EQ computational framework.
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