PEER Reports

Sediment ejecta mechanism contributes significantly to the severity of liquefaction-induced ground failure (e.g., excessive land subsidence). Estimating the amount of ejected sediment is a key step to assess the severity of ground failure; however, procedures to quantify it are currently lacking. Sediment ejecta is a post-shaking phenomenon resulting from the migration and redistribution of excess-pore-water-pressure (ue) generated during earthquake shaking. The dissipation process of residual ue can trigger high-gradient upward seepage, which...

This report presents the results of the study that proposes a retrofitting strategy to manage seismic risk via identification of what constitutes "Corridors” in transportation networks. We define a Corridor as a set of bridges that work together to ensure connectivity and traffic flow between areas of a region. We propose using a Markov clustering algorithm to detect Corridors, whereby it selects sets of bridges that correspond to highway and main road segments that are effective in reducing disruption when jointly retrofitted. We then use a two-stage stochastic optimization to identify...

Earthquakes are one of the most destructive natural disasters with potentially devastating consequences on communities and the supporting infrastructure. To mitigate the effects of earthquakes on communities and infrastructure, the recovery process of building systems should be considered during the design of the building as it is essential for continued operation. This study presents a novel, probabilistic, building-level framework for modeling and evaluating the entire recovery process (F-Rec Framework), including a building’s post-earthquake functionality along with duration and path of...

The continued rapid advancements in High Performance Computing (HPC) hardware and supporting computational ecosystems, combined with new understanding of the underlying physics of earthquake processes, are providing the foundation for the simulation of earthquake ground motions and infrastructure response at regional scale. This latest in a series of Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center (PEER) Pacific Rim Forums brought together a...