PEER Reports

PEER Reports

California Earthquake Early Warning System Benefit Study, PEER Report 2016-06

Laurie A. Johnson
Sharyl Rabinovici
Grace S. Kang
Stephen A. Mahin
2016

The magnitude 6.0 South Napa Earthquake of August 24, 2014, took the lives of two people, injured 300 others, and caused moderate to severe damage to more than 2,000 structures. It is one of the first damaging earthquakes to strike a major metropolitan area in the State of California in over two decades. During that time period, California’s population has grown by over 25%, the state’s economy has tripled, and a great many of the state’s new residents and businesses have never experienced a major earthquake. It is almost guaranteed that there will be a major damaging earthquake somewhere...

PEER Report 2024/09: "Correlation of Ground Motion Duration with Spectral Acceleration and Implications for Expected Bridge Performance"

October 24, 2024

PEER has published Report No. 2024/09: "Correlation of Ground Motion Duration with Spectral Acceleration and Implications for Expected Bridge Performance." It was authored by Maria Camila Lopez Ruiz and Tracy Becker, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Berkeley; Micaela Largent and Jennie Watson-Lamprey, Slate Geotechnical Consultants, Inc.

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Correlation of Ground Motion Duration with Spectral Acceleration and Implications for Expected Bridge Performance, PEER Report 2024-09

Maria Camila Lopez Ruiz
Micaela Largent
Tracy Becker
Jennie Watson-Lamprey
2024

Construction or detailed evaluation of transportation infrastructure requires site-specific ground motions for input into nonlinear structural models. These site-specific ground motions are generally selected based on the magnitude, distance, and site condition of the recorded ground motion. A preliminary study performed by Slate Geotechnical Consultants found that duration and spectral acceleration are negatively correlated for large-magnitude earthquakes recorded on soft-soil sites (Vs30<360 m/s). This means that if the target spectral acceleration is above average, then the average...

Experimental and Numerical Investigation of Ballistic Impact Response of Polymethylmetacrylate, PEER Report 2024-08

Youngjoon Jeon
Khalid Mosalam
2024

For understanding characteristics of Polymethylmetacrylate (PMMA) under impact, the damage behavior of PMMA plates with various thicknesses (1.5 to 6.0 mm) subjected to ballistic impacts with various velocities (63 to 180 m/s) is experimentally investigated using a specialized testing apparatus. Moreover, numerical simulations using the Finite Element Method (FEM) are conducted for the corresponding experimentally studied cases. Ductile response and brittle tensile failure behavior are considered in the FEM to describe the nonlinear response and the failure mode of the PMMA plates. The...

Dynamic Modeling of the UC San Diego NHERI Six-Degree-of-Freedom Large High-Performance Outdoor Shake Table, PEER Report 2024-07

Chin-Ta Lai
Joel P. Conte
2024

The UC San Diego Large High-Performance Outdoor Shake Table (LHPOST), which was commissioned on October 1, 2004 as a shared-use experimental facility of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) program, was upgraded from its original one degree-of-freedom (LHPOST) to a six degree-of-freedom configuration (LHPOST6) between October 2019 and April 2022. The LHPOST6 is a shared-use experimental facility of the NSF Natural Hazard Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) program. A mechanics-based numerical model of the LHPOST6 able to capture...

Ground Failure of Hydraulic Fills in Chiba, Japan and Data Archival in Community Database, PEER Report 2024-06

Scott J. Brandenberg
Jonathan P. Stewart
Kenneth S. Hudson
Dong Youp Kwak
Paolo Zimmaro
Quin Parker
2024

This report describes analysis of ground failure and lack thereof observed in the Mihama Ward portion of Chiba, Japan following the 2011 M9.0 Tohoku Earthquake. In conjunction with this work, we have also significantly expanded the laboratory component of the Next Generation Liquefaction (NGL) relational database.

The district referred to as Mihama Ward is on ground composed of hydraulic fill sluiced in by pipes, thereby resulting in a gradient of soil coarseness, with coarser soils deposited near the pipes and fine-grained soils carried further away. Observations from local...

PEER Report 2024/05: "A Granular Framework for Modeling the Capacity Loss and Recovery of Regional Transportation Networks under Seismic Hazards: A Case Study on the Port of Los Angeles"

June 13, 2024

PEER has published Report No. 2024/05: "A Granular Framework for Modeling the Capacity Loss and Recovery of Regional Transportation Networks under Seismic Hazards: A Case Study on the Port of Los Angeles." It was authored by Michael Benedict Virtucio, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Berkeley; Barbaros Cetiner, NHERI SimCenter; Bingyu Zhao, University of California, Berkeley; Kenichi Soga, TU Wien, Austria; Ertugrul Taciroglu, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering University of California, Los Angeles.

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PEER Report 2024/06: "Ground Failure of Hydraulic Fills in Chiba, Japan and Data Archival in Community Database"

July 9, 2024

PEER has published Report No. 2024/06: "Ground Failure of Hydraulic Fills in Chiba, Japan and Data Archival in Community Database." It was authored by Scott J. Brandenberg, Jonathan P. Stewart, Kenneth S. Hudson, Dong Youp Kwak, Paolo Zimmaro and Quin Parker, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles, California.

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An International Workshop on Large-Scale Shake Table Testing for the Assessment of Soil-Foundation-Structure System Response for Seismic Safety of DOE Nuclear Facilities, A Virtual Workshop – 17-18 May 2021, PEER Report 2024-03

Ramin Motamed
David McCallen
Swasti Saxena
2024

Aging infrastructure within the US Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) nuclear facilities poses a major challenge to their resiliency against natural phenomenon hazards. Examples of mission-critical facilities located in regions of high seismicity can be found at a number of NNSA sites including Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Nevada National Security Site. Most of the nation’s currently operating nuclear facilities have already reached their operating lifetime, and most currently operating...

Two-Dimensional Debris-Fluid-Structure Interaction with the Particle Finite Element Method, PEER Report 2024-04

Minjie Zhu
Michael H. Scott
2024

In addition to tsunami wave loading, tsunami-driven debris can cause significant damage to coastal infrastructure and critical bridge lifelines. Using numerical simulations to predict loads imparted by debris on structures is necessary to supplement the limited number of physical experiments of in-water debris loading. To supplement SPH-FEM (Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics-Finite Element Method) simulations described in a companion PEER report, fluid-structure-debris simulations using the Particle Finite Element Method (PFEM) show the debris modeling capabilities in OpenSees. A new contact...