PEER Reports

In view that cities will continue to house the majority of the world’s population at an increasing rate in the face of climate change, in this report we develop a science-based analysis framework for the quantification of urban and community resilience to natural hazards by applying concepts from statistical mechanics and the quantitative theory of Brownian motion. We envision a city to be a matrix where its citizens are driven by the city’s economy and other incentives, while using its infrastructure networks, in a similar way that thermally driven Brownian particles are moving within a...

The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) manages hundreds of Box-Beam Over-head Sign Structures (BBOSS) installed across its highway network. These steel structures are particularly vulnerable to corrosion damage, especially at the connections involving ribbed sheet steel vertical diaphragms. Corrosion prevention and repair constitute a significant portion of main-tenance costs for this infrastructure. Structural integrity is currently assessed primarily through visual inspections, a process that is inherently subjective and prone to inconsistencies.

This project...

This report is one of a series of reports documenting the methods and findings of a multi-year, multi-disciplinary project conducted by the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center (PEER) with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and funded by the California Energy Commission (CEC). The overall project is titled “Performance-based Earthquake Engineering Assessment Tool for Natural Gas Storage and Pipeline Systems” henceforth referred
to as the “OpenSRA Project.”

The overall goal of the OpenSRA project is to create an open-source, research-based seismic risk...