Ground strain estimation for lifeline earthquake engineering

Current seismic design guidelines in Japan are diverse in the seismic ground strain estimates, because the concepts on a horizontally propagating wave model are not consistent in various seismic design guidelines including gas, water and other underground structures.<br /> The purpose of this study is (a) to derive the analytical methods to estimate the ground strains for incident seismic waves, (b) to develop a statistical estimation technique of the ground strains, and finally (c) to compare the theoretical estimation with the observed data which was measured at 441 sites in the 1999 Chi-Chi Earthquake in Taiwan.