Sarcheshmeh copper mine, with the final reserves of 828 million tons of sulfur ore and average grade of 0.74%, is known to be the largest open pit of Iran and most probably the second largest copper mine in the world. This mine is located in the seismotectonic zone of Central-Iran, and 23 Km away from the 150 Km long Rafsanjan active fault.In this study the vulnerability of the west wall of the...

This paper provides a methodology to quantify the interrelationship between the seismic intensity parameters and the structural damage. First, a computer-supported elaboration of the accelerograms provides several peak, spectral and energy seismic parameters. After that, nonlinear dynamic analyses are carried out to provide the structural response for a set of seismic excitations. Among the sev...

Introduction Earthquakes are one of the natural hazards that have caused many casualties and financial losses around the world. This is why earthquake risk analysis studies need to be conducted more seriously. Iran is located in one of the seismogenic regions of the world, the Himalayan-Alpine belt, which is subject to many earthquakes every year. The Arias intensity, as one of the important s...

To understand the seismic damage characteristics of bottom frame-wall buildings and to study their seismic performance, the seismic damage outcomes of  bottom frame-wall structures in Du jiang weir by the Wen chuan earthquake on May 12,2008, China were field observed and studied. The assesment of the seismic damage to the bottom frame-wall masonry in Du jiang weir urban showed that the damage t...

In recent decades many researchers have studied on the damage assessment of structures after a seismic event. To assess the damage of structures under an earthquake, it is so important to study the correlations between earthquake parameters and damages of the structures. A lot of seismic parameters have been defined by researchers to characterize an earthquake. Spectral parameters of an earthqu...

The June 15, 1896 Sanriku earthquake generated devastating tsunamis with the maximum run-up of 25 m and caused the worst tsunami disaster in the history of Japan, despite its moderate surface wave magnitude (Ms=7.2) and weak seismic intensity. This is a typical tsunami earthquake, which generates anomalously larger tsunamis than expected from its seismic waves. Previously proposed mechanisms of...

For many years the Modified Mercalli (MM) scale has been used to describe the observed effects of sizeable earthquakes on buildings and people. Initially isoseismal lines of the effects were added to maps by hand. Some objective methods have been proposed eg. DeRubeis et al. [14], Brillinger [2, 3, 4, 6], Wald et al.[33], Pettenati et al. [25]. The work presented here develops such methods furt...

This study develops a novel simulation-based procedure for the estimation of the likelihood that seismic intensity (in terms of spectral acceleration) and tsunami inundation (in terms of wave height), at a particular location, will exceed given hazard levels. The procedure accounts for a common physical rupture process for shaking and tsunami. Numerous realizations of stochastic slip distributi...

This study investigates the sensitivity of design variables such as ultimate strength of concrete, yield stress of reinforcing steel and damping ratio to the seismic response of staggered wall structures. Two different methods for sensitivity analysis, the tornado diagram method and the first-order second-moment method, are applied to two types of model structures. Non-linear dynamic analyses a...