Seismic Methods Used in the CO_2 SINK Project,Ketzin Germany

The CO2 SINK project,started in April 2004,is a pilot scale CO2 geological storage project being carried out to provide operational field experience for large scale CO2 geologic storage.The research area selected for the project is the Ketzin anticline near Berlin,Germany.Since CO2 storage in geological media has to be done safely and requires public acceptance,proper monitoring systems need to be designed for each operation.Various kinds ot seismic methods can be used to map the underground tructure and monitor the movement of injected CO2,such as crosswell,vertical seismic profile（VSP）,moving source profiling（MSP）,2D and 3D surface time lapse techniques.In 2004,surface seismic sources were tested in a pilot study at the Ketzin site for the

Numerical investigation of the effects of soil-structure and granular material-structure interaction on the seismic response of a flat-bottom reinforced concrete silo

In this work,a numerical study of the effects of soil-structure interaction(SSI)and granular material-structure interaction(GSI)on the nonlinear response and seismic capacity of flat-bottomed storage silos is conducted.A series of incremental dynamic analyses(IDA)are performed on a case of large reinforced concrete silo using 10 seismic recordings.The IDA results are given by two average IDA capacity curves,which are represented,as well as the seismic capacity of the studied structure,with and without a consideration of the SSI while accounting for the effect of GSI.These curves are used to quantify and evaluate the damage of the studied silo by utilizing two damage indices,one based on dissipated energy and the other on displacement and dissipated energy.The cumulative energy dissipation curves obtained by the average IDA capacity curves with and without SSI are presented as a function of the base shear,and these curves allow one to obtain the two critical points and the different limit states of the structure.It is observed that the SSI and GSI significantly influence the seismic response and capacity of the studied structure,particularly at higher levels of PGA.Moreover,the effect of the SSI reduces the damage index of the studied structure by 4%.

Comparative Analysis of Application of Seismic Wave Reflection Method in Advanced Geological Prediction

Seismic wave reflection method is an advanced geophysical detection method in tunnel geological prediction.It is more sensitive and effective in detecting geological anomalies such as fault fracture zone and karst.In order to verify the prediction efficacy and accuracy of the seismic wave reflection method with different instruments and equipment(tunnel geological prediction[TGP]/tunnel seismic prediction[TSP])and different vibration modes(hammering,explosives),a comparison test was carried out in Jinping Tunnel.The test results showed that the time-consumption of the hammering source was short,which can greatly reduce the impact on the construction site;different vibration sources methods of seismic wave reflection can predict the unfavorable geological sections accurately.

The Ultimate Anti-Seismic Design Method

The design mechanisms and methods of the invention are intended to minimize problems related to the safety of structures in the event of natural phenomena such as earthquakes, tornadoes, and strong winds. It is achieved by controlling the deformations of the structure. Damage and deformation are closely related concepts since the control of deformations also controls the damage. The design method of applying artificial compression to the ends of all longitudinal reinforced concrete walls and, at the same time, connecting the ends of the walls to the ground using ground anchors placed at the depths of the boreholes, transfers the inertial stresses of the structure in the ground, which reacts as an external force in the structure’s response to seismic displacements. The wall with the artificial compression acquires dynamic, larger active cross-section and high axial and torsional stiffness, preventing all failures caused by inelastic deformation. By connecting the ends of all walls to the ground, we control the eigenfrequency of the structure and the ground during each seismic loading cycle, preventing inelastic displacements. At the same time, we ensure the strong bearing capacity of the foundation soil and the structure. By designing the walls correctly and placing them in proper locations, we prevent the torsional flexural buckling that occurs in asymmetrical floor plans, and metal and tall structures. Compression of the wall sections at the ends and their anchoring to the ground mitigates the transfer of deformations to the connection nodes, strengthens the wall section in terms of base shear force and shear stress of the sections, and increases the strength of the cross-sections to the tensile at the ends of the walls by introducing counteractive forces. The use of tendons within the ducts prevents longitudinal shear in the overlay concrete, while anchoring the walls to the foundation not only dissipates inertial forces to the ground but also prevents rotation of the walls, thus maintaining the structural integrity of the beams. The prestressing at the bilateral ends of the walls restores the structure to its original position even inelastic displacements by closing the opening of the developing cracks.

Seismic Methods for Exploration and Exploitation of Gas Hydrate

Seismic and rock physics play important roles in gas hydrate exploration and production.To provide a clear cognition of the applications of geophysical methods on gas hydrate,this work presents a review of the seismic techniques,rock physics models,and production methods in gas hydrate exploration and exploitation.We first summarize the commonly used seismic techniques in identifying the gas hydrate formations and analyze the limitations and challenges of these techniques.Then,we outline the rock physics models linking the micro-scale physical properties and macro-scale seismic velocities of gas hydrate sediments,and generalize the common workflow,showing the frequently-used procedures of building models with detailed analysis of the potential uncertainties.Afterwards,we summarize the production techniques of gas hydrate and point out the problems regarding the petrophysical basis and abnormal seismic responses.In the end,considering the geological and engineering problems,we come up with several aspects of using geophysical techniques to solve the problems in gas hydrate exploration and production,hopefully to provide some important clues for future studies of gas hydrate.

Modeling seismic wave propagation in heterogeneous medium using overlap domain pseudospectral method

Pseudospectral method is an efficient and high accuracy numerical method for simulating seismic wave propaga- tion in heterogeneous earth medium. Since its derivative operator is global, this method is commonly considered not suitable for parallel computation. In this paper, we introduce the parallel overlap domain decomposition scheme and give a parallel pseudospectral method implemented on distributed memory PC cluster system for modeling seismic wave propagation in heterogeneous medium. In this parallel method, the medium is decomposed into several subdomains and the wave equations are solved in each subdomain simultaneously. The solutions in each subdomain are connected through the transferring at the overlapped region. Using 2D models, we compared the parallel and traditional pseudospectral method, analyzed the accuracy of the parallel method. The results show that the parallel method can efficiently reduce computation time for the same accuracy as the traditional method. This method could be applied to large scale modeling of seismic wave propagation in 3D heterogeneous medium.

Effective wave identification and interference analysis of the seismic reflection method in mines

Through discussion of the time-distance curve characteristics of the direct waveand from the front,side and rear of the reflection waves of the seismic reflection methodfor advanced exploration in mines,and analysis of several major interference waves inmines,the differences in time-distance curve,frequency,apparent velocity between theeffective wave and interference wave in the seismic reflection method for advanced explorationare obtained.According to the differences,the effective wave is extracted andthe interference wave is filtered and the system's precision and accuracy is improved.

Seismic wave input method for three-dimensional soil-structure dynamic interaction analysis based on the substructure of artificial boundaries

The method of inputting the seismic wave determines the accuracy of the simulation of soil-structure dynamic interaction. The wave method is a commonly used approach for seismic wave input, which converts the incident wave into equivalent loads on the cutoff boundaries. The wave method has high precision, but the implementation is complicated, especially for three-dimensional models. By deducing another form of equivalent input seismic loads in the fi nite element model, a new seismic wave input method is proposed. In the new method, by imposing the displacements of the free wave fi eld on the nodes of the substructure composed of elements that contain artifi cial boundaries, the equivalent input seismic loads are obtained through dynamic analysis of the substructure. Subsequently, the equivalent input seismic loads are imposed on the artifi cial boundary nodes to complete the seismic wave input and perform seismic analysis of the soil-structure dynamic interaction model. Compared with the wave method, the new method is simplifi ed by avoiding the complex processes of calculating the equivalent input seismic loads. The validity of the new method is verifi ed by the dynamic analysis numerical examples of the homogeneous and layered half space under vertical and oblique incident seismic waves.

Slope stability analysis under seismic load by vector sum analysis method

The vibration characteristics and dynamic responses of rock and soil under seismic load can be estimated with dynamic finite element method （DFEM）. Combining with the DFEM, the vector sum analysis method （VSAM） is employed in seismic stability analysis of a slope in this paper. Different from other conventional methods, the VSAM is proposed based on the vector characteristic of force and current stress state of the slope. The dynamic stress state of the slope at any moment under seismic load can he obtained by the DFEM, thus the factor of safety of the slope at any moment during earthquake can be easily obtained with the VSAM in consideration of the DFEM. Then, the global stability of the slope can be estimated on the basis of time-history curve of factor of safety and reliability theory. The VSAM is applied to a homogeneous slope under seismic load. The factor of safety of the slope is 1.30 under gravity only and the dynamic factor of safety under seismic load is 1.21. The calculating results show that the dynamic characteristics and stability state of the slope with input ground motion can be actually analyzed. It is believed that the VSAM is a feasible and practical approach to estimate the dynamic stability of slopes under seismic load.

Accelerating the discontinuous Galerkin method for seismic wave propagation simulations using multiple GPUs with CUDA and MPI

We have successfully ported an arbitrary highorder discontinuous Galerkin method for solving the threedimensional isotropic elastic wave equation on unstructured tetrahedral meshes to multiple Graphic Processing Units （GPUs） using the Compute Unified Device Architecture （CUDA） of NVIDIA and Message Passing Interface （MPI） and obtained a speedup factor of about 28.3 for the single-precision version of our codes and a speedup factor of about 14.9 for the double-precision version. The GPU used in the comparisons is NVIDIA Tesla C2070 Fermi, and the CPU used is Intel Xeon W5660. To effectively overlap inter-process communication with computation, we separate the elements on each subdomain into inner and outer elements and complete the computation on outer elements and fill the MPI buffer first. While the MPI messages travel across the network, the GPU performs computation on inner elements, and all other calculations that do not use information of outer elements from neighboring subdomains. A significant portion of the speedup also comes from a customized matrix-matrix multiplication kernel, which is used extensively throughout our program. Preliminary performance analysis on our parallel GPU codes shows favorable strong and weak scalabilities.

Optimization of a precise integration method for seismic modeling based on graphic processing unit

General purpose graphic processing unit （GPU） calculation technology is gradually widely used in various fields. Its mode of single instruction, multiple threads is capable of seismic numerical simulation which has a huge quantity of data and calculation steps. In this study, we introduce a GPU-based parallel calculation method of a precise integration method （PIM） for seismic forward modeling. Compared with CPU single-core calculation, GPU parallel calculating perfectly keeps the features of PIM, which has small bandwidth, high accuracy and capability of modeling complex substructures, and GPU calculation brings high computational efficiency, which means that high-performing GPU parallel calculation can make seismic forward modeling closer to real seismic records.

Seismic assessment of unanchored steel storage tanks by endurance time method

Liquid storage tanks are essential structures that are often located in residential and industrial areas; thus an assessment of their seismic performance is an important engineering issue. In this paper, the seismic response ofunanchored steel liquid storage tanks is investigated using the endurance time （ET） dynamic analysis procedure and compared to responses obtained for anchored tanks under actual ground motions and intensifying ET records. In most cases, the results from ground motions are properly obtained with negligible differences using ET records. It is observed that uplifting of the tank base, which is closely related to the tank aspect ratio, has the greatest significance in the responses of the tank and can be predicted with reasonable accuracy by using currently available ET records.

An improved pseudo-static method for seismic resistant design of underground structures

This paper describes a commonly used pseudo-static method in seismic resistant design of the cross section of underground structures. Based on dynamic theory and the vibration characteristics of underground structures, the sources of errors when using this method are analyzed. The traditional seismic motion loading approach is replaced by a method in which a one-dimensional soil layer response stress is differentiated and then converted into seismic live loads. To validate the improved method, a comparison of analytical results is conducted for internal forces under earthquake shaking of a typical shallow embedded box-shaped subway station structure using four methods： the response displacement method, finite element response acceleration method, the finite element dynamic analysis method and the improved pseudo-static calculation method. It is shown that the improved finite element pseudo-static method proposed in this paper provides an effective tool for the seismic design of underground structures. The evaluation yields results close to those obtained by the finite element dynamic analysis method, and shows that the improved finite element pseudo-static method provides a higher degree of precision.

Analysis of the Wenchuan Ms8.0 Earthquake's Co-seismic Stress and Displacement Change by Using the Finite Element Method

The variation of in situ stress before and after earthquakes is an issue studied by geologists. In this paper, on the basis of the fault slip dislocation model of Wenchuan Ms8.0 earthquake, the changes of co-seismic displacement and the distribution functions of stress tensor around the Longmen Shan fault zone are calculated. The results show that the co-seismic maximum surface displacement is 4.9 m in the horizontal direction and 6.5 m in the vertical direction, which is almost consistent with the on-site survey and GPS observations. The co-seismic maximum horizontal stress in the hanging wall and footwall decreased sharply as the distance from the Longmen Shan fault zone increased. However, the vertical stress and minimum horizontal stress increased in the footwall and in some areas of the hanging wall. The study of the co-seismic displacement and stress was mainly focused on the long and narrow region along the Longmen Shan fault zone, which coincides with the distribution of the earthquake aftershocks. Therefore, the co-seismic stress only affects the aftershocks, and does not affect distant faults and seismic activities. The results are almost consistent with in situ stress measurements at the two sites before and after Wenchuan Ms8.0 earthquake. Along the fault plane, the co-seismic shear stress in the dip direction is larger than that in the strike direction, which indicates that the faulting mechanism of the Longmen Shan fault zone is a dominant thrust with minor strike-slipping. The results can be used as a reference value for future studies of earthquake mechanisms.

Efficient structural seismic performance evaluation method using improved endurance time analysis

Evaluation of structural performance under seismic excitations from low intensity to high intensity is essential to verify the seismic resistant capacity of a structure, and usually carried out by the incremental dynamic analysis (IDA) method or pushover method. The recently developed endurance time (ET) method is another method that uses dynamic pushover excitations, i.e., endurance time acceleration function, to obtain results similar to those obtained by IDA or pushover methods with low computational cost and acceptable accuracy. This study proposes an improvement on the ET method by considering more restrictions for both the elastic and inelastic response spectra in the generation procedure, and by specifying a target duration. Four reinforced concrete frame structures with 4, 8, 12, and 16 stories are adopted to verify the accuracy of the improved method. Comparison of the results obtained by the proposed method, the ET method and the IDA method shows that the improved method has a higher accuracy than the ET method. For evaluation of structural responses under specifi c ground motion intensity, which is typically required in seismic design codes, the results obtained by the proposed method are compared with fi ve commonly used ground motion selection methods, and shows the proposed method provides acceptable accuracy for engineering applications.

Comparison of North American Seismic Screening Methods Applied to School Buildings

An ongoing project at McGill University is aimed at developing an adapted seismic screening method for schools in the province of Qu6bec, Canada. As part of this project the ＂FEMA 154 Rapid Visual Screening of Buildings for Potential Seismic Hazard＂ and the ＂NRC92 Manual for Screening of Buildings for Seismic Investigation＂ were used to assess 102 school buildings located in the city of Montr6al. Results for both methods are in reasonable agreement, with 65% of the buildings requiring a detailed evaluation according to FEMAI54 and 50% according to NRC92. Findings highlighted the particular characteristics of educational facilities： they are low rise buildings with high incidence of structural irregularities. Accounting for them in the screening phase is essential, and is better achieved by NRC92. However, this method is largely based on expert opinion, which makes it difficult to update, while FEMA154 uses a rational methodology for calculating vulnerability scores based on the capacity spectrum approach. The FEMA154 analytical procedure allows updating and adapting the method to its use outside its intended scope.

Probabilistic seismic loss estimation via endurance time method

Probabilistic Seismic Loss Estimation is a methodology used as a quantitative and explicit expression of the performance of buildings using terms that address the interests of both owners and insurance companies. Applying the ATC 58 approach for seismic loss assessment of buildings requires using Incremental Dynamic Analysis （IDA）, which needs hundreds of time-consuming analyses, which in turn hinders its wide application. The Endurance Time Method （ETM） is proposed herein as part of a demand propagation prediction procedure and is shown to be an economical alternative to IDA. Various scenarios were considered to achieve this purpose and their appropriateness has been evaluated using statistical methods. The most precise and efficient scenario was validated through comparison against IDA driven response predictions of 34 code conforming benchmark structures and was proven to be sufficiently precise while offering a great deal of efficiency. The loss values were estimated by replacing IDA with the proposed ETM-based procedure in the ATC 58 procedure and it was fotmd that these values suffer from varying inaccuracies, which were attributed to the discretized nature of damage and loss prediction functions provided by ATC 58.

Determining the Basaltic Sequence Using Seismic Reflection and Resistivity Methods

This study was carried out in Harat Rahat (south of Almadinah Almonwarah) using seismic reflection and resistivity methods. The main objectives of this study are to determine the extent of the basaltic layer and to define the subsurface faults and fractures that could affect and control the groundwater movement in the study area. A 2D seismic profile was acquired and the result shows that the subsurface in the study area has a major fault. We obtained a well match when the seismic result was compared with drilled wells. As a complementary tool, the resistivity method was applied in order to detect the groundwater level. The results of the resistivity method showed that six distinct layers have been identified. The interpretation of these six layers show that the first three layers, the fourth layer, the fifth layer and the bottom of the section indicated various subsurface structures and lithologies;various basaltic layers, fractured basalt, weathered basement and fresh basaltic layers, respectively. It is obvious that the eventual success of geophysical surveys depend on the combination with other subsurface data sources in order to produce accurate maps.

Application of the Common Offset Seismic Reflection Method to Urban Active Fault Surveys

The method and principle of common offset seismic surveys as well as the field data gathering and processing technique were introduced briefly. Through two urban active fault survey examples in Fuzhou and Shenyang, the efficiency and limitation of using the common offset seismic reflection technique to carry out urban active fault surveys were probed. The results show that this technique has the properties of high resolving power, better reconstruction of subsurface structures, and real-time analyzing and interpretation of investigation results on site. This method can be used to quickly locate objects under investigation accurately in the areas with thinner Quaternary overburdens and strong bedrock interface fluctuations.

2-D Seismic Reflection Method Using Iso Velocity Method of Mianwali Area

A seismic reflection of Line 12-B belonging to Mianwali Re-entrant was acquired and processed for 2-D interpretation. The line orients itself NNE-SSW direction. The sections have the shot points from VP-199 to VP-1044. Eleven Reflectors R1, R2, R3, Base Miocene, Pinchout P1, P2, P3, P4, P5P6 (Pinchout) are marked and a basement has been marked and interpreted. All the reflectors above the basement show a downward bending at the center. The depth of each reflector was calculated by iso velocity contour map method. The depth section obtained by this method shows stratigraphic features like Pinchouts. The reflectors are then correlated with the subsurface structures and stratigraphy of the area.