Earthquake engineering for beginners

[davek671]

Hi guys,

I'm currently a fairly experienced structural engineer (5 years) from the UK, but I have been giving consideration to moving to New Zealand for a while. Obviously this will bring about a significant change in design codes for me, but I think the biggest thing will be the need for earthquake engineering.

I haven't done any earthquake related design since Uni, and even then it was fairly basic. Can anyone recommend me any good textbooks where I can start to get a grasp of this subject? I need to get a fairly good first principle grasp on it before I would consider working as an engineering in NZ.

Thanks for your help,
Dave

 

[msquared48]

OOOH! Hold on to your hats - they just had a 6.3 in the North Island today! May be heating up again there...

Better git yer book lern'n dun more fast!



Mike McCann
MMC Engineering

http://mmcengineering.tripod.com

 

[MrHershey]

I like the Seismic Design Handbook by Farzad Naiem. Is geared towards US engineers and codes, but the fundamentals are still good. Is really good about stepping through things and explaining them. Wish my University had used this text instead of the one they did for Earthquake Engineering. I got a lot of the basic information and concepts but almost zero in terms of actually applying the knowledge. This text provides both.

 

[Qshake]

I second the handbook by Naiem and also suggest that texts by Park and Pauly will also be beneficial especially to those in New Zealand. Park and Pauly have the staple written on both Masonry and Concrete for seismic loading.

Regards,
Qshake

Eng-Tips Forums:Real Solutions for Real Problems Really Quick.

 

[davek671]

Thanks for the suggestions guys, will have a look into them.

 

[homostructural]

These two links are really helpful:
Bibliography for seismic design of structures & Recommendations for the seismic design of buildings. Design guide for architects and structural engineers.

 

[JoshPlumSE]

Seismic Design Hanbook is good, but the portions of it that relate to building codes is getting a bit out of date:

AISC's Seismic design manual is good (though many will complain about too main typos in the first printing). You might wait for the 2nd edition manual to come out. I believe it is coming out within the next few months.

I also like this article from Structure magazine. Specifically, figure 1 does a great job explaining the basic concept of why we have three variables (R, Omega, Cd) to define the seismic behavior. In this case, a picture is worth a thousand words.

http://www.structuremag.org/Archives/2008-9/C-GuestCol-SeismicDesign-SEAOC-Sept08.pdf