Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Enhancement of Very Large Earthquake Modelling TechniquesThe seismic design of large or critical structures, such as high-rise buildings, dams, and bridges, typically involves dynamic analysis that uses accelerograms of the expected earthquake motions as input. For most regions, including eastern North America, such accelerograms are often simulated due to a lack of applicable real earthquake recordings of the desired magnitudes and distance ranges. My research team at Carleton University has been studying earthquake fault modelling techniques for 14 years, and we have introduced a technique that has been widely used in seismic ground motion simulations. Our earthquake modelling technique has been requested and used by engineers, seismologists, and graduate students from 28 countries, including Algeria, Australia, Canada, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, Finland, France, Greece, Iceland, India, Iran, Italy, Japan, Kyrgyzstan, Nepal, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, Portugal, Romania, Taiwan, Turkey, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States. Our technique generates accelerograms mainly for frequencies from 1.0 Hz to 20 Hz. This range covers the frequency content of earthquakes classified as small to moderate-large, but it does not cover very large earthquakes. The main objective of this study is to include the lower frequencies (0.1 Hz to 1.0 Hz) in our earthquake modelling technique. The enhanced modelling technique combines low frequency techniques (finite difference, finite element, and finite spectral methods) with our successful high frequency stochastic modelling technique. The proposed research will increase our ability to model very large earthquakes for the seismic design of engineered structures in Canada and other countries. Our research results will be offered as a free-of-charge and user-ready program to simulate very large earthquakes as required for a variety of applications.