Overview

SECED 2015 was a two-day conference on Earthquake and Civil Engineering Dynamics that took place on 9-10th July 2015 at Homerton College, Cambridge.

This was the first major conference to be held in the UK on this topic since SECED hosted the 2002 European Conference on Earthquake Engineering in London.

The conference brought together experts from a broad range of disciplines, including structural engineering, nuclear engineering, seismology, geology, geotechnical engineering, urban development, social sciences, business and insurance; all focused on risk, mitigation and recovery.

Conference themes

  • Geotechnical earthquake engineering
  • Seismic design for nuclear facilities
  • Seismic hazard and engineering seismology
  • Masonry structures
  • Risk and catastrophe modelling
  • Vibrations, blast and civil engineering dynamics
  • Dams and hydropower
  • Seismic assessment and retrofit of engineered and non-engineered structures
  • Social impacts and community recovery

Keynote speakers

SECED 2015 featured the following keynote speakers (affiliations correct at the time of the conference):

  • Peter Ford and Tim Allmark, Office for Nuclear Regulation, UK
  • Don Anderson, CH2M HILL, Seattle, USA
  • Bernard Dost, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, The Netherlands
  • Anne Kiremidjian, Stanford University, USA
  • Rob May, Golder Associates, Australia
  • Tiziana Rossetto, University College London, UK
  • Andrew Whittaker, University at Buffalo, USA
  • Mike Willford, Arup, The Netherlands

Information for authors

SECED allows the self-archiving of the Author Accepted Manuscripts (AAM) from the SECED 2015 Conference. This means that all authors can make their conference paper available via a green open access route. The full text of your paper may become visible within your personal website, your institutional repository, a subject repository or a scholarly collaboration network signed up to the voluntary STM sharing principles. It may also be shared with interested individuals, for teaching and training purposes at your own institution and for grant applications (please refer to the terms of your own institution to ensure full compliance).

To deposit your AAM, please adhere to the following conditions:

  • You should include a link back to the SECED website.
  • You should include all of the relevant metadata (article title, conference name, conference location, conference dates etc.).
  • You should include a clear licensing statement (see below).

SECED allows authors to deposit their AAM under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial International Licence 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0). The deposit must clearly state that the AAM is deposited under this licence and that any reuse is allowed in accordance with the terms outlined by the licence. To reuse the AAM for commercial purposes, permission must be sought by contacting seced@ice.org.uk. For the sake of clarity, commercial usage would be considered as, but not limited to:

  • Copying or downloading AAMs for further distribution for a fee.
  • Any use of the AAM in conjunction with advertising.
  • Any use of the AAM by for promotional purposes by for-profit organisations.
  • Any use that would confer monetary reward, commercial gain or commercial exploitation.

Should you have any questions about our licensing policies, please contact seced@ice.org.uk.

 

Earthquake Risk and Engineering towards a Resilient World

9 - 10 July 2015, Homerton College, Cambridge, UK

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Review

It is common practice in laboratory tests for the assessment of the liquefaction potential of sands to convert the irregular acceleration time-history to an equivalent number of uniform stress cycles. For this, a number of methodologies exist which are mainly based on Miner's (1945) accumulated damage concept. Miner’s theory states that the damage that a material undergoes is not affected by the location of a cycle of stress within the loading history. However, soil is a nonlinear material with a stress path-dependent response. The composition of the loading history in terms of stress cycles and their magnitude should therefore have an influence on sands’ liquefaction resistance. To shed more light on this, the recorded base ground motion from the Chi Chi, Taiwan, seismic event of the 20th September 1999 is used in non-linear elasto-plastic plane strain effective stress-based finite element analyses of a hypothetical homogeneous soil deposit consisting of Nevada Sand. The irregular surface acceleration time-history is then converted to an equivalent number of uniform as well as non-uniform amplitude cycles at different percentages of the maximum shear stress and single element undrained simple shear tests are numerically simulated. The soil response is investigated to assess the accuracy of the empirical procedures on the response of sands to liquefaction. The results suggest that the empirical methods may lead to non-conservative conclusions.

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