Journal of Earthquake and Tsunami

The inter-storey drift limitation is an important index for the structural design of tall buildings. The inter-storey drift limitation of steel-hybrid structures for tall buildings is studied in this paper. It is found that it is more reasonable to divide the inter-storey drift of steel–concrete hybrid structures into harmless part and harmful part. It is meaningful to limit the harmful drift for preventing the crack of concrete walls in hybrid structures. A formula to calculate the allowable harmful inter-storey drift with no cracks of concrete walls is deduced for hybrid structures for tall buildings. The effectiveness of the formula is verified through the FEM analysis of a typical tall building hybrid structure.

In recent years, much attention has been paid to research and development of structural control techniques with particular emphasis on alleviation of wind and seismic response of buildings and bridges in China. Structural control in civil engineering has been developed from the concept into a workable technology and applied into practical engineering structures. The aim of this paper is to review a state-of-the-art of researches and application of structural control in civil engineering in China. It includes the passive control, active control, hybrid control, and semi-active control. Finally, the possible future directions of structural control in civil engineering in China are presented.

The large-scale construction of underground structures prompts researchers and engineers to reconsider seismic safety of existing and new underground structures against future strong earthquakes. This paper attempts to assess the current state-of-the-art in experimental and analytical researches on large-scale urban underground buildings. Three key issues, which need to be urgently resolved in numerical computation, are also discussed. Finally, necessity and applicability of damage control techniques are explored. The techniques, which are proved to be effective in surface buildings, are expected to update seismic performances of underground structures.

This paper describes an evacuation assessment from a fire following disaster when a severe earthquake strikes a congested city area. Probabilistic approach will be taken to simulate the evacuation scenario along all the streets which are crowded with evacuation people, in which the ratio of fire-proof structures, ignition rates from fire gutted houses, and population density are assumed in a probabilistic manner based on the investigation data of the 1994 Northridge and 1995 Kobe earthquakes. This study provides a decision measure on how much fire resistive housing ratio is effective or not to prevent the fire initiation, and also to provide an insight on the disaster prevention strategy on the optimal open space allocations for evacuation.