Seismic damage simulation in urban areas based on a high-fidelity structural model and a physics engine

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Author(s)
Xu, Zhen
Lu, Xinzheng
Guan, Hong
Han, Bo
Ren, Aizhu
Griffith University Author(s)
Year published
2014
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Effective seismic damage simulation is an important task in improving earthquake resistance and safety of dense urban areas. There exist two significant technical challenges for realizing such a simulation: accurate prediction and realistic display. A high-fidelity structural model is proposed herein to accurately predict the seismic damage that was inflicted on a large number of buildings in an urban area via time-history analysis (THA), with which the local damage to different building stories is also explicitly obtained. The accuracy and efficiency of the proposed model are validated by a refined finite element (FE) ...
View more >Effective seismic damage simulation is an important task in improving earthquake resistance and safety of dense urban areas. There exist two significant technical challenges for realizing such a simulation: accurate prediction and realistic display. A high-fidelity structural model is proposed herein to accurately predict the seismic damage that was inflicted on a large number of buildings in an urban area via time-history analysis (THA), with which the local damage to different building stories is also explicitly obtained. The accuracy and efficiency of the proposed model are validated by a refined finite element (FE) analysis of a typical building. A physics engine-based algorithm is also proposed that realistically displays building collapse, thus overcoming the limitations of the high-fidelity structural model. Furthermore, a visualization system integrating the proposed model and collapse simulation is developed so as to completely display the seismic damage in detail. Finally, the simulated seismic damage of a real medium-sized Chinese city is evaluated to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed techniques, which can provide critically important reference information for urban disaster prevention and mitigation.
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View more >Effective seismic damage simulation is an important task in improving earthquake resistance and safety of dense urban areas. There exist two significant technical challenges for realizing such a simulation: accurate prediction and realistic display. A high-fidelity structural model is proposed herein to accurately predict the seismic damage that was inflicted on a large number of buildings in an urban area via time-history analysis (THA), with which the local damage to different building stories is also explicitly obtained. The accuracy and efficiency of the proposed model are validated by a refined finite element (FE) analysis of a typical building. A physics engine-based algorithm is also proposed that realistically displays building collapse, thus overcoming the limitations of the high-fidelity structural model. Furthermore, a visualization system integrating the proposed model and collapse simulation is developed so as to completely display the seismic damage in detail. Finally, the simulated seismic damage of a real medium-sized Chinese city is evaluated to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed techniques, which can provide critically important reference information for urban disaster prevention and mitigation.
View less >
Journal Title
Natural Hazards
Volume
71
Issue
3
Copyright Statement
© 2013 Springer Netherlands. This is an electronic version of an article published in Natural Hazards, Volume 71, Issue 3, pp 1679-1693, 2013. Natural Hazards is available online at: http://link.springer.com/ with the open URL of your article.
Subject
Atmospheric sciences
Physical geography and environmental geoscience
Structural engineering