The objective of this paper is to provide a brief overview of damage as observed immediately following the earthquake. Detailed studies of structural seismic performance, conducted in the time elapsed since August 1999, are not the subject of this paper, but rather the object of other papers presented in this Special Issue of the Journal. Damage to reinforced concrete, masonry, and steel struct...

Abstract—Past earthquakes have shown that seismic events may incur large economic losses in buildings. FEMA P-58 provides engineers a practical tool for the performance seismic assessment of buildings. In this study, FEMA P-58 is applied to two typical Italian pre-1970 reinforced concrete frame buildings, characterized by plain rebars as steel reinforcement and masonry infills and partitions. G...

The question of material consumption is one of the most important issues in seismic design of multi-story frames. The paper illustrates how material consumption can be reduced by utilizing shear wall according to the Performance-Based Seismic Design (PBSD). For this purpose, different story frames with and without shear walls are designed In addition, a simple algorithm is proposed for monitori...

We present the data from a unique observational study of Spica, a binary system with a primary component of β Cephei type. We exploit simultaneous high-resolution spectroscopic observations and high-precision photometry obtained by the MOST satellite. By disentangling the spectra of this binary, we get an accurate determination of the orbit. Future work includes a full seismic analysis of the s...

In reflection seismology, knowing the seismic wavelet is important both for processing seismic data and for modeling the seismic response. There are two approaches to obtain the seismic wavelet. One approach is deterministic and the other is statistic. This work belongs to the second category. A seismic wavelet is determined by the product of amplitude spectrum and phase spectrum. A conventiona...

this paper presents the numerical analysis of seismic soil-pile-superstructure interaction in soft clay using free-field soil analysis and beam on winkler foundation approach. this model is developed to compute the nonlinear response of single piles under seismic loads, based on one-dimensional finite element formulation. the parameters of the proposed model are calibrated by fitting the experi...

SUMMARY By cross-correlating recordings of ambient seismic noise, one can retrieve the subsurface reflection response. The quality of the retrieved reflections would depend on the qualities of the ambient noise. In a previous study, we cross-correlated ambient-noise data recorded in a desert area in North Africa and showed that we retrieved reflections. This was done assuming that body-wave noi...

A conceptual framework for the probabilistic performance-based seismic assessment of building structures that considers both model uncertainty and response sensitivity to ground motion modification is presented in this paper. A new damage model is proposed for the assessment of building performance to seismic loads. The model is derived at the material level and combined at the element, story a...

Bridge structure performance estimation under a seismic hazard can be significantly influenced by the level of modelling detail within the simulation of the soil structure interaction phenomenon. As the computational demands of such estimation greatly restricts the implementation of a detailed truncated FEM simulation of the semiinfinite soil domain, the Kelvin – Voigt Model within the framewor...