Advanced Earthquake Engineering Analysis

This book contains lecture notes, albeit not covering all materials, delivered at the course on Advanced Earthquake Engineering Analysis that took place at CISM Udine in July 3-7, 2005.

During the last decade, the state of the Art in Earthquake Engineering Design has made significant steps towards a more rationale analysis of structures. Scientists have long recognized that earthquake design is guided by displacements and deformations rather than forces. However due to the historical background of structural engineers in static analyses, effects of earthquake on structures have been viewed as forces acting on the structures. All presently available design building codes are developed along these lines.

Our knowledge of ground motion characteristics, earthquake geotechnical engineering, structural behavior (design and numerical analyses) and model tests have advanced to a point where it is possible to anticipate a significant move from force based design approaches to displacements based design approaches. Although displacement based design approaches constitute the kernel of most research programs, they have not yet been incorporated in the State of Practice.
The purpose of the course was to review the fundamentals of displacement based methods, starting from engineering seismology, earthquake geotechnical engineering, to focus on design, analysis and testing of structures with emphasis on buildings and bridges.

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