摘要
The distribution of many active faults in western China is an important reasonfor the frequent earthquakes. With the rapid development of the western region, manymajor projects have been built there and the existence of active faults is bound to have aninfluence on the safety of the engineering structure. Therefore, it is of great significanceto study the mechanism of fault slip instability for evaluating the geological stability ofthe region and for the site selection of major projects. In this paper, cusp catastrophetheory is used to establish a cusp catastrophe model with general softened form ofstrike-slip faults on the basis of strike-slip faults. In this model, the influence of thesoftening property of fault zone on fault instability is considered. Based on this model,the conditions of slip instability of strike-slip faults are derived and further the half-slipdistance, far-field displacement and energy release equation of sliding-slip fault arerevealed. The influences of the system stiffness ratio and the softening property of thefault zone on the half-wave displacement, the far-field displacement and the energyrelease are shown. Which lays a good foundation for further research on activefault-induced earthquake mechanism.
