What if the big earthquake strikes again? A scenario simulation of 1679 M8 Sanhe-Pinggu earthquake

More details of the simulation can be found in the book: Earthquake Disaster Simulation of Civil Infrastructures: From Tall Buildings to Urban Areas, Singapore: Springer, 2017 www.springer.co...
After the 2008 M8 Wenchuan earthquake, Professor Zhaoyuan Chen, a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, raised a question: “What if the 1679 M8 Sanhe-Pinggu earthquake happened again? The epicenter of Sanhe-Pingu earthquake was merely 40 km from the central district of Beijing city, resulting the entire city lying in ruins. By now, the energy in the fault has been accumulated for more than 300 years, but nobody can guarantee the huge earthquake will never happen again. As a result, a scientific scenario simulation of the 1679 Sanhe-Pinggu earthquake may help citizens and decision makers drawing attention to the importance of earthquake disaster prevention.”
What if the 1679 M8 Sanhe-Pinggu earthquake happened again? After an 8-year study, our research group has come up with a preliminary answer to this question.
The video shows the simulation result (referred to as Result v0.2) of the Beijing City CBD due to a repeat of the 1679 M8 Sanhe-Pinggu earthquake, proposed by our research group and other cooperating organizations such as China Earthquake Administration. Let’s see the basic conclusion firstly: The simulation result shows that most of the CBD buildings have a slight or moderate damage state, subjected to the 1679 Sanhe-Pinggu earthquake. One of the main reasons is that the CBD is roughly 50 km away from the epicenter. At such a distance the seismic ground motion intensity has a fairly large attenuation. The ground motion intensity on the site of CBD is approximately between the Design Basis Earthquake and the Maximum Considered Earthquake. Meanwhile, the buildings in the CBD have a relatively good seismic resistance. In particular, for the important buildings (such as the tallest building in the video), the seismic design performance is even higher than conventional buildings. Hence, the buildings are mostly at slight or moderate damage.
To perform such simulations shown in the video, the following 4 key scientific problems have been solved by our group and other cooperating organizations such as China Earthquake Administration.
1. Seismic damage prediction of a building group based on the multi-scale model and nonlinear time-history analysis
2. High performance computing based on CPU/GPU heterogeneous parallel programming
3. High-fidelity visualization based on 3D urban polygonal model and physics engine
4. Earthquake fault rupture procedure simulation based on 4D source model and seismic wave propagation simulation (Changhua Fu et al.)
Key scientific problem 1
Seismic damage prediction of a building group based on the multi-scale model and nonlinear time-history analysis
Traditional regional seismic damage prediction methods generally use Damage Probability Matrices or fragility curves based on empirical statistics, as a consequence, the intensity, spectrum and duration of ground motion, as well as the distinction of seismic resistance of different buildings cannot be easily considered in such methods. In order to overcome such limitations, we suggest using multi-scale urban building model and nonlinear time-history analysis, so that the nonlinear seismic response history of the building can be directly obtained.
For details, please refer to:
[1] Collapse simulation of reinforced concrete high-rise building induced by extreme earthquakes, Earthquake Engineering & Structural Dynamics, 2013
[2] Collapse simulation of a super high-rise building subjected to extremely strong earthquakes. Science China Technological Sciences, 2011
[3] A shear wall element for nonlinear seismic analysis of super-tall buildings using OpenSees, Finite Elements in Analysis & Design, 2015
[4] Parameter determination and damage assessment for THA-based regional seismic damage prediction of multi-story buildings, Journal of Earthquake Engineering, 2016.
[5] A nonlinear computational model for regional seismic simulation of tall buildings, Bulletin of Earthquake Engineering, 2016.
[6] A coarse-grained parallel approach for seismic damage simulations of urban areas based on refined models and GPU/CPU cooperative computing. Advances in Engineering Software, 2014.
[7] Building seismic response and visualization using 3d urban polygonal modeling, Automation in Construction, 2015
[8] Seismic damage simulation in urban areas based on a high-fidelity structural model and a physics engine, Natural Hazards, 2014