Design charts for seismic pressures against rigid walls subjected to horizontal earthquake shaking are presented for both uniform and nonuniform backfills. Solutions are based on a simplified model of soil response which gives results that agree almost exactly with rigorous solutions. Peak seismic thrusts are presented for three different soil profiles. For each profile, 250 combinations of gro...

Large dams, especially concrete dams, have been designed against earthquakes since the construction of Hoover dam in the 1930s. The design criteria and methods of analysis used in those times are outdated today and the actual seismic safety of these structures is not known in view of today’s requirements. Earthquake action was usually taken into account pseudostatically, through an inertia forc...

The concept of the response spectrum Method was formulated and proposed in 1932 for use in the analysis and design of earthquake-resistant structures. To commemorate the 70 anniversary of this event, this paper reviews Biot’s seminal contributions, which created this method, and then briefly outlines the milestones in the general evolution of the response spectrum method. The techniques for com...

The research leading to this paper was prompted by the need to estimate strength and stiffness of Rigid Rocking Cores (RRCs) as essential elements of resilient earthquake resisting structures. While a limited number of such studies have been reported, no general study in terms of physical properties of RRCs, their appendages and adjoining structures have been published. Despite the growing know...

This study focuses on the shape optimization of concrete gravity dams considering dam–water–foundation interaction and nonlinear effects subject to earthquake. The concrete gravity dam is considered as a two–dimensional structure involving the geometry and material nonlinearity effects. For the description of the nonlinear behavior of concrete material under earthquake loads, the Drucker–Prager...

We introduce here the Earthquake Network project which implements a world-wide smartphone-based sensor network for the detection of earthquakes. Thanks to the accelerometric sensor, smartphones possibly detect the waves of a quake and report the event to a cloud computing infrastructure. In this work, we propose a solution to the detection problem based on statistical modelling the arrival time...