Supercomputers Measure Quake Risk Across San Francisco Bay Area
Scientists and engineers are simulating precisely how a large-magnitude earthquake along the Hayward Fault would affect different locations and buildings across the San Francisco Bay Area.
A team from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, both U.S. Department of Energy national labs, is leveraging powerful supercomputers to examine the impact of high-frequency ground motion on thousands of representative different-sized buildings spread out across the California region.
Their work will help show how different seismic wave frequencies of ground motion affect structures of various sizes. Lower-frequency ground motion is known to affect larger structures and is easier to replicate by computer simulation. Small structures like homes are more vulnerable to high-frequency shaking, which requires more advanced computing to simulate.
The researchers are presenting three scientific papers describing their recent simulations at this week’s U.S. National Conference on Earthquake Engineering, a meeting held every four years by the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute.
The national lab researchers simulated ground motions at a broad range of frequencies to quantify seismic risk for representative building structures on a regional scale. A total of 9,600 structural dynamic simulations were employed and analyzed to study the risk variation on a 100-kilometer by 50-kilometer domain for two events: one at magnitude 6.5, and another at magnitude 7.
Simulations showed that two buildings with the same number of stories equidistant from the fault line and only roughly 3 miles apart can have a substantially different damage potential due to the differences in which seismic waves emanating from the fault merge together. Buildings in proximity to the fault rupture and fault-rupture directivity zone were found to be at greater risk of damage from the earthquakes, and fault-slip-associated permanent ground displacement was shown to increase with event magnitude.
The research was funded by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science.
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