Over the last two decades, significant research effort has been directed toward the application of advanced technologies to improve the seismic performance of civil infrastructure. MCEER has played a role in that development. In this paper, we present an overview of the integrated MCEER research program aimed at the development of a new generation of seismic resilient buildings. While MCEER res...

Mantle seismic structure beneath the United States spanning from the active western plate margin to the passive eastern margin was imaged with teleseismic P and S wave traveltime tomography including USArray data up to May 2014. To mitigate artifacts from crustal structure 5–40 s, Rayleigh wave phase velocities were used to create a 3-D starting model. Major features of the final P and Smodels ...

The seismic rehabilitation designs of two reinforced concrete school buildings, representative of a wide stock of similar edifices designed under earlier editions of the Italian Technical Standards, are presented in this paper. The mutual retrofit solution elaborated for the two buildings consists in the incorporation of a dissipative bracing system including pressurized fluid viscous springdam...

Since the beginning of the 1980s seismic tomography studies have helped to unravel the deep structure and to constrain the kinematic models of tectonic evolution of Italy. In this chapter I describe the main features of the upper mantle structure beneath the Tyrrhenian – Apennine system obtained by jointly analysing the tomographic results with the distribution of subcrustal earthquakes. A new ...

The limits of the conventional fixed-base seismic design of structures are stressed, together with the capability of the modern seismic vibration passive control (SVPC) techniques to overcome such limits, for both new and existing constructions. The main features of such techniques (seismic isolation, energy dissipation and those using shock transmitters and shape memory alloys) are summarized....

Industrial equipments and systems can suffer structural damage when hit by earthquakes, so that accidental scenarios as fire, explosion and dispersion of toxic substances can take place. As a result, overall damage to people, environment and properties increases. The present paper deals with seismic risk analysis of industrial facilities where atmospheric storage tanks (anchored or unanchored t...

S U M M A R Y Relations between reflection and transmission responses of horizontally layered media were formulated by Claerbout in 1968 and by many others. In this paper we derive similar relations for 3-D inhomogeneous media. As the starting point for these derivations, we make use of two types of propagation invariants, based on one-way reciprocity theorems of the convolution type and of the...

The project Retreating-trench, extension, and accretion tectonics, RETREAT, is a multidisciplinary study of the Northern Apennines (earth.geology.yale.edu/RETREAT/), funded by the United States National Science Foundation (NSF) in collaboration with the Italian Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV) and the Grant Agency of the Czech Academy of Sciences (GAAV). The main goal of RE...

In many real-life situations, we have different types of data. For example, in geosciences, we have seismic data, gravity data, magnetic data, etc. Ideally, we should jointly process all this data, but often, such a joint processing is not yet practically possible. In such situations, it is desirable to “fuse” models (images) corresponding to different types of data: e.g., to fuse an image corr...