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April 12, 2004,
Vol. 74, No. 12S
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| SHAKEN
BUT NOT STIRRED: CEE
department chair and professor Greg Fenves is working on an earthquake
simulation system that will help prepare communities if a real one
strikes. |
Fenves talks
about seismic simulation at Berkeley in Silicon Valley event
Californians live with the risk of a major earthquake occurring at
any moment. It’s not a matter of if, but when. What if you could
predict the damage before the ground begins to shake?
Berkeley civil engineers are developing new large-scale computational
simulations of ground motion and building response in urban regions
to help understand and prepare for the inevitable. These simulations
will enable building code requirements to be examined, improved, and
tested. Meanwhile, citywide forecasts of damage patterns will help emergency
response teams plan for the “big one.”
“The goal is to use powerful computers to paint a rational picture
of the impact of earthquakes of various magnitudes on entire regions
rather than individual buildings,” says principal investigator
and CEE department chair, Gregory L. Fenves. “This will be a laboratory
for what-if scenarios.”
The Seismic Performance for Urban Regions (SPUR) effort is a National
Science Foundation-funded joint project between UC Berkeley, Carnegie
Mellon University, Mississippi State University, and UC Irvine. Fenves
will discuss SPUR at the upcoming Berkeley in Silicon Valley symposium
on April 24.
The SPUR system works by integrating data about earthquake ground motion
with computer models of real buildings in a particular urban region.
The first experiments are designed to shake up a virtual cityscape of
Los Angeles.
“Los Angeles has an extensive system of faults and there’s
more detailed geophysical data available than anywhere else in the world,”
Fenves says. “It also has a variety of building construction types,
including some very hazardous structures.”
Currently, the simulation is populated with hundreds of thousands of
building models that represent the various classes of construction found
in Los Angeles, from steel moment resisting frames to reinforced concrete
buildings. Eventually, actual building inventories from city records
along with residential construction models will increase the realism
of the simulations, according to Fenves.
“Perhaps in the future, if you’d like to improve a major
building you might be required to submit a computer model to the city
that can be plugged into a system like this one,” he says.
Once the simulation is loaded with building data, a quake is triggered
with the press of a button. The researchers can then literally look
at the pattern of damage across the entire region.
Knowing what will happen in an earthquake before it happens will provide
disaster response teams with a much-needed leg up. The SPUR simulations
highlight zones where damage is expected to be the most severe.
“Someday, citizens in seismically active regions could log on
to a Web site, pick a scenario, and see how their block would fare in
an earthquake,” Fenves says.
Written by David Pescovitz
Come hear Professor Fenves speak at the Berkeley in Silicon Valley
symposium. Go to www.COE.Berkeley.EDU/bisv/
to learn more about the event.
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