• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.40 no.5
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• pp.455-463
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• 2020

Road facilities with a service life of more than 30 years are expected to triple in the next ten years. The seismic performance of road facilities should be reviewed with consideration of the "Common Application of Seismic Design Standards" issued by Korea's Ministry of Public Administration and Security in 2017. These standards should be applied to all existing road facilities, including retrofitted or seismic-designed facilities, for evaluating seismic performance. In order to manage seismic performance for a large number of facilities, decision-support technology that can provide economic and reliable results is needed. However, the indices method currently used in Korea is a deterministic method, and the seismic performance of individual facilities is evaluated based on qualitative indices so that only retrofitting among road facilities is prioritized. In turn, with the indices method, it is difficult to support decisions other than the decision to prioritize retrofitting. Therefore, it is necessary to use the seismic risk assessment method to overcome such shortcomings and provide useful information such as direct loss, indirect socio-economic loss, and benefit of the investment.

• Journal of the Korean GEO-environmental Society
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• v.19 no.10
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• pp.13-19
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• 2018

Following the 2016 Gyeongju earthquake, the Pohang Earthquake occurred in 2017, and the south-east region in Korea is under the threat of an earthquake. Especially, in the Pohang Earthquake, the liquefaction phenomenon occurred in the sedimentation area of the coast, and preparation of countermeasures is very important. The soil liquefaction can affect the underground facilities directly as well as various structures on the ground. Therefore, it is necessary to identify the liquefaction risk of facilities and the structures against the possible earthquakes and to prepare countermeasures to minimize them. In this study, we investigated the seismic liquefaction risk about the electric power utility tunnels in the southeast area where the earthquake occurred in Korea recently. In the analysis of seismic liquefaction risk, the earthquake with return period 1000 years and liquefaction potential index are used. The liquefaction risk analysis was conducted in two stages. In the first stage, the liquefaction risk was analyzed by calculating the liquefaction potential index using the ground survey data of the location of electric power utility tunnels in the southeast region. At that time, the seismic amplification in soil layer was considered by soil amplification factor according to the soil classification. In the second stage, the liquefaction risk analysis based on the site response analyses inputted 3 earthquake records were performed for the locations determined to be dangerous from the first step analysis, and the final liquefaction potential index was recalculated. In the analysis, the site investigation data were used from the National Geotechnical Information DB Center. Finally, it can be found that the proposed two stage assessments for liquefaction risk that the macro assessment of liquefaction risk for the underground facilities including the electric power utility tunnel in Korea is carried out at the first stage, and the second risk assessment is performed again with site response analysis for the dangerous regions of the first stage assessment is reasonable and effective.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.26 no.5C
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• pp.313-322
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• 2006

Liquefaction of soil foundation is one of the major seismic damage types for infrastructures. In this paper, deterministic and probabilistic approaches for the evaluation of liquefaction potential are briefly summarized and the risk assessment method is newly proposed using seismic fragility and seismic hazard analyses. Currently the deterministic approach is widely used to evaluate the liquefaction potential in Korea. However, it is very difficult to handle a certain degree of uncertainties in the soil properties such as elastic modulus and resistant capacity by deterministic approach, and the probabilistic approaches are known as more promising. Two types of probabilistic approaches are introduced including (1) the reliability analysis (to obtain probability of failure) for a given design earthquake and (2) the seismic risk analysis of liquefaction for a specific soil for a given service life. The results from different methods show a similar trend, and the liquefaction potential can be more quantitatively evaluated using the new risk analysis method.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.55 no.3
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• pp.981-988
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• 2023

A seismic event caused an accident at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, which further resulted in simultaneous accidents at several units. Consequently, this incident has aroused great interest in the safety of nuclear power plants worldwide. A reasonable safety evaluation of such an external event should appropriately consider the correlation between SSCs (structures, systems, and components) and the probability of failure. However, a probabilistic safety assessment in current nuclear industries is performed conservatively, assuming that the failure correlation between SSCs is independent or completely dependent. This is an extreme assumption; a reasonable risk can be calculated, or risk-based decision-making can be conducted only when the appropriate failure correlation between SSCs is considered. Thus, this study analyzed the effect of the failure correlation of SSCs on the safety of the system to realize rational safety assessment and decision-making. Consequently, the impact on the system differs according to the size of the failure probability of the SSCs and the AND and OR conditions.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.24 no.4
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• pp.303-316
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• 2023

Rapid post-earthquake damage estimation of subway stations is particularly necessary to improve short-term crisis management and safety measures of urban subway systems after a destructive earthquake. The conventional Performance-Based Earthquake Engineering (PBEE) framework with constant earthquake occurrence rate is invalid to estimate the aftershock risk because of the time-varying rate of aftershocks and the uncertainty of mainshock-damaged state before the occurrence of aftershocks. This study presents a time-varying probabilistic seismic risk assessment framework for underground structures considering mainshock and aftershock hazards. A discrete non-omogeneous Markov process is adopted to quantify the time-varying nature of aftershock hazard and the uncertainties of structural damage states following mainshock. The time-varying seismic risk of a typical rectangular frame subway station is assessed under mainshock-only (MS) hazard and mainshock-aftershock (MSAS) hazard. The results show that the probabilities of exceeding same limit states over the service life under MSAS hazard are larger than the values under MS hazard. For the same probability of exceedance, the higher response demands are found when aftershocks are considered. As the severity of damage state for the station structure increases, the difference of the probability of exceedance increases when aftershocks are considered. PSDR=1.0% is used as the collapse prevention performance criteria for the subway station is reasonable for both the MS hazard and MSAS hazard. However, if the effect of aftershock hazard is neglected, it can significantly underestimate the response demands and the uncertainties of potential damage states for the subway station over the service life.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.14 no.6
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• pp.577-587
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• 2018

The quantitative assessment of the seismic collapse risk of a structure requires the usage of an optimal intensity measure (IM) which can adequately characterise the severity of the ground motion. Research suggests that the average spectral acceleration ($Sa_{avg}$) may be an efficient and sufficient alternate IM as compared to the more traditional first mode spectral acceleration, $Sa(T_1)$, particularly during seismic collapse risk estimation. This study primarily presents a comparative evaluation of the sufficiency of the average spectral acceleration with respect to ground motion duration, and secondarily assesses the impact of ground motion duration on collapse risk estimation. By assembling a suite of 100 historical ground motions, incremental dynamic analysis of 60 different inelastic single-degree-of-freedom (SDF) oscillators with varying periods and ductility capacities were analysed, and collapse risk estimates obtained. Linear regression models are used to comparatively quantify the sufficiency of $Sa_{avg}$ and $Sa(T_1)$ using four significant duration metrics. Results suggests that an improved sufficiency may exist for $Sa_{avg}$ when the period of the SDF system increases, particularly beyond 0.5, as compare to $Sa(T_1)$. In reference to the ground motion duration measures, results indicated that the sufficiency of $Sa_{avg}$ is more sensitive to significant duration definitions that consider almost the full wave train of an accelerogram ($SD_{a5-95}$ and $SD_{v5-95}$). In order to obtain a reduced variability of the collapse risk estimate, the 5-95% significant duration metric defined using the Arias integral ($SD_{a5-95}$) should be used for seismic collapse risk estimation in conjunction with $Sa_{avg}$.

• Journal of Korean Society of Steel Construction
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.13-20
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• 2010

Seismic risk assessment of railway bridges is an important issue for a transportation network, because loss of functionality of railway bridges could result in severe disruption of the railway line, as no redundant routing systems generally exist. Although many studies have been conducted by numerous researchers regarding fragility analyses of bridge structure, little or no studies have been done for fragility analyses of a class of bridge structures considering their geometric variability. This study performs a fragility analysis for Track-on Steel-Plate-Girder (TOSPG) railway bridges in Korea considering their span variability. Seismic fragility curves are developed for a series of bridges with different spans varying from 2 to 15. At last, the fragility curves for the whole TOSPG bridges in Korea are also developed using the total probability theorem. This study is expected to effectively contribute to the seismic risk assessment of railway lines, where a number of bridges are present.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.359-374
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• 2017

The seismic events in Northern Italy, May 2012, have revealed the seismic vulnerability of typical Italian precast industrial buildings. The aim of this paper is to present a seismic fragility model for Italian RC precast buildings, to be used in earthquake loss estimation and seismic risk assessment by comparing two building typologies and three different codes: D.M. 3-03-1975, D.M. 16-01-1996 and current Italian building code that has been released in 2008. Based on geometric characteristics and design procedure applied, ten different building classes were identified. A Monte Carlo simulation was performed for each building class in order to generate the building stock used for the development of fragility curves trough analytical method. The probabilistic distributions of geometry were mainly obtained from data collected from 650 field surveys, while the material properties were deduced from the code in place at the time of construction or from expert opinion. The structures were modelled in 2D frameworks; since the past seismic events have identified the beam-column connection as the weakest element of precast buildings, two different modelling solutions were adopted to develop fragility curves: a simple model with post processing required to detect connection collapse and an innovative modelling solution able to reproduce the real behaviour of the connection during the analysis. Fragility curves were derived using both nonlinear static and dynamic analysis.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.97-107
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• 2021

A comprehensive study on seismic performance of wood frame building in hilly regions is presented. Specifically, seismic fragility assessment of a typical wood frame building at various locations of the northeast region of India are demonstrated. A three-dimensional simplified model of the wood frame building is developed with due consideration to nonlinear behaviour of shear walls under lateral loads. In doing so, a trilinear model having improved capability to capture the force-deformation behaviour of shear walls including the strength degradation at higher deformations is proposed. The improved capability of the proposed model to capture the force-deformation behaviour of shear wall is validated by comparing with the existing experimental results. The structural demand values are obtained from nonlinear time history analysis (NLTHA) of the three-dimensional wood frame model considering the effect of uncertainty due to record to record variation of ground motions and structural parameters as well. The ground motion bins necessary for NLTHA are prepared based on the identified hazard level from probabilistic seismic hazard analysis of the considered locations. The maximum likelihood estimates of the lognormal fragility parameters are obtained from the observed failure cases and the seismic fragilities corresponding to different locations are estimated accordingly. The results of the numerical study show that the wood frame constructions commonly found in the region are likely to suffer minor cracking or damage in the shear walls under the earthquake occurrence corresponding to the estimated seismic hazard level; however, poses negligible risk against complete collapse of such structures.

• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.367-392
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• 2020

The specific characteristics of near-field earthquake records can lead to different dynamic responses of bridges compared to far-field records. However, the effect of near-field strong ground motion has often been neglected in the seismic performance assessment of the bridges. Furthermore, damage to horizontally curved multi-frame RC box-girder bridges in the past earthquakes has intensified the potential of seismic vulnerability of these structures due to their distinctive dynamic behavior. Based on the nonlinear time history analyses in OpenSEES, this article, assesses the effects of near-field versus far-field earthquakes on the seismic performance of horizontally curved multi-frame RC box-girder bridges by accounting the vertical component of the earthquake records. Analytical seismic fragility curves have been derived thru considering uncertainties in the earthquake records, material and geometric properties of bridges. The findings indicate that near-field effects reasonably increase the seismic vulnerability in this bridge sub-class. The results pave the way for future regional risk assessments regarding the importance of either including or excluding near-field effects on the seismic performance of horizontally curved bridges.