Earthquake engineering deals with the study of earthquake forces and its effects on the buildings and structures.
Reinforced Concrete Buildings In recent times, reinforced concrete buildings have become common in India, particularly in towns and cities. Reinforced concrete (or simply RC) consists of two primary materials, namely concrete with reinforcing steel bars. Concrete is made of sand, crushed ...
Why a Building Twists In your childhood, you must have sat on a rope swing – a wooden cradle tied with coir ropes to the sturdy branch of an old tree. The more modern versions of these swings can be seen ...
The Earthquake Problem Severity of ground shaking at a given location during an earthquake can be minor, moderate and strong. Relatively speaking, minor shaking occurs frequently, moderate shaking occasionally and strong shaking rarely. For instance, on average annually about 800 ...
Importance of Architectural Features The behaviour of a building during earthquakes depends critically on its overall shape, size and geometry, in addition to how the earthquake forces are carried to the ground. Hence, at the planning stage itself, architects and structural ...
What are the Seismic Effects on Structures? Inertia Forces in Structures Earthquake causes shaking of the ground. So a building resting on it will experience motion at its base. From Newton’s First Law of Motion, even though the base of the ...
The point on the fault where slip starts is the Focus or Hypocenter, and the point vertically above this on the surface of the Earth is the Epicenter (Figure 1). The depth of focus from the epicenter, called as Focal ...
Seismic Waves Large strain energy released during an earthquake travels as seismic waves in all directions through the Earth’s layers, reflecting and refracting at each interface. These waves are of two types – body waves and surface waves; the latter are ...
India being a large landmass is particularly prone to earthquakes. The Indian subcontinent is divided into five seismic zones with respect to the severity of the earthquakes. The classification of the zones has been done by the geologist and scientist ...
Magnitude: Measure of the amount of energy released during an earthquake. It is usually expressed using Richter scale. Professor Charles Richter noticed that at a constant distance, seismograms records of earthquake ground vibration of larger earthquake have bigger wave amplitude than ...
Structures on the earth are generally subjected to load of two types static and dynamic. Static loads are constant with time while dynamic loads are time varying. The majority of civil engineering structures are designed with assumptions that all applied ...