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1.0 INTRODUCTION
Soil conditions and local geological features affecting the ground response are
numerous. Some of the more important features are horizontal extent and depth of
the soil deposits overlying bedrock, slopes of the bedding planes of the soils overlying
bedrock, changes of soil types horizontally, topography of both bedrock and deposited
soils and faults crossing the soil deposits.
A complete ground response analysis
Ideally, a complete ground response analysis should take into account the following
factors:
Rupture mechanism at source of an earthquake (source).
Propagation of stress waves through the crust to the top of bedrock beneath
the site of interest (path).
How ground surface motion is influenced by the soils that lie above the
bedrock (site amplification).
In reality, several difficulties arise and uncertainties exist in taking account the above
listed factors:
In professional practice, the following procedures are usually adopted to make the
process tractable and overcome the above difficulties:
Seismic hazard analyses (probabilistic or deterministic) are used to predict
bedrock motions at the location of the site.
Seismic hazard analyses rely on empirical attenuation
relationships to predict bedrock motion parameters.
Ground response problem becomes one of determining
responses of soil deposit to the motion of the underlying
bedrock.
The following are the sequence of steps (Figure 1) to be followed to modify the
earthquake motions in the bedrock to account for the effects of soil profile at a site.
These are widely used for ‘ground response analysis’ or ‘soil amplification studies’ as:
Methods of analysis
Linear analysis.
Equivalent linear analysis.
Nonlinear analysis.
Kayen and Mitchell (1997) studied the ground failure following the 1989 Loma
Prieta earthquake. They note that the peak horizontal accelerations on sites underlain by
rock and stiff alluvium in the east bay of San Francisco generally ranged between 0.08 and
0.12g. On the other hand, the amplification due to the presence of soft and deep
cohesive soil deposits underlying artificial fills produced peak accelerations from 0.11 to
0.29 g. Further, the peak horizontal accelerations on Bay Shore fills in the vicinity of
Oakland International Airport, and Bay Farm Island were apparently about 0.27 g, and
at the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge toll plaza and Port of Oakland’s container
terminal at Seventh Street were about 0.28-0.29 g.
During the 1985 Michoacan earthquake, though the epicenter was located more than
350 km from Mexico City, the earthquake caused extensive damage in areas underlain by
soft deposits (Zeevaert 1991). As reported by Seed et al. (1988), Mexico City is underlain
partly by an ancient lake bed and partly by stiffer material. The shear wave velocities of
deposits in the lake bed are ranging from 40 to 90 m/s. But the bedrock below these
sediments has a shear wave velocity greater than 500 m/s. The high impedance contrast
between the two layers amplified shaking at the ground surface by factors ranging from 3
to 20 and caused extensive damage (Dobry et al. 2000). Seed et al. (1988) evaluated and
compared the ground motions from the main shock and after shock for a site. Ground
motion was similar for both showing that ground shaking was due to the site conditions
rather than the source.
Observations from recent earthquakes have demonstrated that ground-motion amplifi-
cation is more pronounced for weak ground motions than for strong ground motions
because of nonlinear soil behaviour. The largest amplifications in both the Loma Prieta
and the Michoacan earthquakes were recorded at significant distances from the epicentre
where the amplitude of propagating seismic waves is generally considered to be less
due to attenuation (Romero and Rix 2005). During the Kobe earthquake the peak
values of accelerations measured in the heavily damaged areas were in the range of 0.7-0.8
g and in the reclaimed areas, these accelerations were from 0.3-0.6 g. The ground
motions were amplified by a factor of 1.5-2 times in the heavily damaged areas within deep
sedimentary layers.
Zaslavsky et al. (2003) carried out seismic site response studies along the coastal plain
of Israel. They found the loose sediments of sand and alluvium yielded amplification
factors of 2-3 in the frequency range 1.2-3.5 Hz. In the Carmel coast, the complex
calcareous sandstone and loose sediments, with a total thickness of 15-30 m, that covers
the Judea Group carbonates, had amplification factor up to 8 at frequency ranging from 2 to
6 Hz. Luc Chouinard et al. (2004) conducted ground response studies as a part of seismic
microzonation of Montreal Urban area. The results of their studies indicate that the
amplification factor for different seismic scenarios were in excess of 3 in zones with a
10-15 m clay layer. Further unconsolidated river deposits also exhibited amplification
factors of 3.
It was observed that a number of medium-to-high-rise residential reinforced concrete
buildings having four to ten storeys suffered extensive damage and/or collapse in Ah-
medabad city, located 300 km away from the epicentre following the 2001 Bhuj (India)
earthquake. The soil conditions at the site represented deep alluvial deposits. A case study
on seismic response of ground and reinforced concrete buildings carried out by Gov-
indaraju et al. (2004) showed that there was amplification of peak ground acceleration by a
factor 1.66. Further, high degree of damage to multi-storey buildings was essentially due
to the transfer of large accelerations to high-rise buildings by soil amplification.
The site amplification characteristics of the 2003 Bam, Iran, earthquake were investi-
gated by Mohammad Kazem Jafari et al. (2005). Based on their geological studies as well
as geophysical, microtremor and aftershock measurements in the study area a site-effect
microzonation map was prepared classifying the ground conditions of the city into five
distinct categories depending on their stiffness, thickness and frequency characteristics.
The highest percentage of damage was concentrated in sites with stiff shallow and medium
depth soils, which possessed considerable amplification potentials in high frequency ran-
ges. The effect of alluvial deposits in Central Khartoum, Sudan, on the propagation of
seismic motion parameters to the ground surface was investigated by Mohamedzein et al.
(2006). The subsoil conditions at Central Khartoum are characterized by alluvial deposits
underlain by Nubian sandstone at a depth of 25 m. The equivalent-linear earthquake
response analyses (EERA) were carried out to study the effect of local soil conditions on
ground-motion parameters. The results indicated that amplification of ground motion was
up to 4.93.
Results show that the mean ground response spectrum at the non-liquefied site
is close to the estimated ground response spectrum from the JBF model, but the mean
ground response spectrum at the liquefied site is much lower than the estimated ground
response spectrum from the JBF model for periods of up to 1.3 s. The mean PGA at the
non-liquefied site is about 1.6-1.7 times as large as that at the liquefied site, but the mean
peak ground displacement (PGD) at the non-liquefied site has a slight difference with that
at the liquefied site. The mean permanent displacements at the liquefied site are larger
than those at the non-liquefied site, particularly at the liquefied layer.
M.J. Arefi, M. Cubrinovski & B.A. Bradley (2013)conducted study on “Site response
analysis of Christchurch soil sites using a non-linear model” on a set of equivalent linear and
nonlinear site response analysis, using the RHSC and CBGS strong motion station soil
profiles were carried out in order to evaluate the influence of the induced hysteretic
damping. The commonly used two-mode Rayleigh damping was employed to separately
simulate the low-strain damping. Furthermore, both Masing and proposed model give a
PGA that is lower than the equivalent approach. However, in the midperiod range (0.04-
1s) they provide responses that are significantly higher than the EQL spectrum.
Interestingly, all the results are similar for long period ranges.
The performance of the nonlinear site response analysis as well as the proposed
formulation can be assessed employing the deconvolved fault-parallel motion
for site response analyses of other strong motion stations such as
CBGS in this case. In terms of PGA, all methods resulted in similar results;
however Masing-type analyses slightly underestimated the PGA at the CBGS stations. In
general, the proposed model predicted higher response values than the Masing-type
formulation except for the period range 0.04-0.1s. It is seen in Figure 1b that
all methods overestimated the spectral acceleration at periods higher 1s.
The overestimation of damping using Masing rules is more pronounced at larger
strain levels and because the maximum shear strains computed in this profile were less than
0.1%, it is not conclusive whether the proposed model can adequately capture the response.
A new simple equation was proposed for modeling of unloading-reloading branches
of cyclic stress-strain hysteresis loops for sandy soils. The proposed model uses the
hyperbolic model as the backbone
curve to represent the modulus reduction curve. It was shown that the model is capable of
capturing any desired level of energy dissipation as a function of shear strain in contrast to
conventional models which tend to overestimate damping. Therefore, both the
modulus reduction and damping curves can
be simulated simultaneously. In a further attempt, the proposed model was employed to
simulate the nonlinear behaviour of two profiles which underlie two strong
motion stations. The equivalent analysis, nonlinear analysis using Masing criteria,
and nonlinear analysis using the proposed model
were compared in order to study the effect of modelling damping in the surface ground
motion.
The paper described many of the important and practical developments designed to
improve the quality of nonlinear site response analysis. This included small and large
strain damping formulations, porewater pressure generation models, inverse analysis for
learning dynamic soil behavior. The paper also discussed other practical issues including
layer thickness and rock base modeling requirements.
This study shows that, expected peak ground acceleration (PGA) at rock level
using DSHA for Bangalore is about 0.15 g. Based on large amount of borehole data with SPT
‘N ’ values, 3-D geotechnical borehole model has been generated using GIS. Field ‘N’ values
were corrected for various corrections. The site characterization of Bangalore
is attempted using measured shear wave velocity from Multichannel Analysis of Surface
Wave. Average shear wave velocity at each 5 m interval up to a depth of 30 m was evaluated
and presented. Based on soil average shear wave velocity and 30 m average shear wave
velocity, as per NEHRP and IBC, Bangalore is classified as “Site class D”. Theoretical 1-D
site response study shows that the amplification factor is in the range of 1 to 4.7and
predominant frequency varies from 3 to 12 Hz. The results of site response studies using
SPT data and MASW data are comparable. Ground response parameters evaluated using
MASW data are slightly lower when compared to the para-
meters obtained using SPT data. Field study of microtremor also shows similar values of
predominant frequencies for the selected sites. Predominant frequency obtained from these
three methods matches very well. Liquefaction hazard map has been generated using factor of
safety against liquefaction. Liquefaction study shows that Bangalore is safe against
liquefaction except at few locations where the overburden is sandy silt with presence of
shallow water table.
they both present reasonable results. Furthermore, the model trained by subtractive
clustering offers high accuracy compared with the other model. This study revealed
that ANFIS models are appropriate frame work to deal with the
problem of nonlinear ground response to earthquake-induced motions. It is to be
mentioned that some other methods, including finite element method, FEM, have
been proposed before to predict this response when soil
material behave nonlinearly. The method introduce herein, however, offers ease of use
as well as high accuracy simultaneously. Moreover, such models may be
trained on experimental data to achieve more legitimate results from
practical point of view.
REFERENCES
[4] Jianjing ZHANG and Changwei YANG (1972) “Characteristics of seismic responses
at liquefied and non-liquefied sites with same site conditions” Journal of Modern
Transportation, Volume 19, Number 2, Page 134-142.
[5] Bagheripour, M. H., Asadi, M., Ghasemi, M. (2012) “Analysis of Nonlinear Seismic
Ground Response Using Adaptive Nero Fuzzy Inference Systems” J. Basic. Appl. Sci.
Res, 2(4)3839-3843, 2012.Page 3839-3843.