Research Applications for
Earthquake Engineering Simulation
An alternative approach to using general-purpose proprietary tools is
the use of community-generated applications that are generally both
freely available and reliable enough for production-quality use.
A
number of such community-developed applications are given below, for
use
in a variety of applications from structural and geotechnical
engineering.
FEAP
FEAP is one of the most
successful community analysis tools in the history of computational
engineering. Beginning as a pioneering demonstration open-source
finite-element application developed in conjunction with O.C.
Zienkiewicz and R.L. Taylor's classic textbook Finite Element Method,
the FEAP (a Finite Element Analysis Program) enterprise has become an
incredibly full-featured and powerful computational analysis tool.
URL's for FEAP Information
IDARC
IDARC is an analysis suite
for simulation of seismic response of
structural frames composed of steel and concrete members. New
capabilities in IDARC include the ability to perform accurate analyses
of bridge structures. Unlike many commercial finite-element
tools, IDARC facilitates accurate analysis of
reinforced concrete frames, including inelasticity models calibrated to
support typical earthquake engineering response. IDARC is a
community-based tool with many useful features for researchers and
practitioners of earthquake engineering, and the program is
well-supported by a community of users, and the IDARC program suite is
available for no charge to users registered with the IDARC users' group.
URL's for IDARC Information
NONLIN
NONLIN is an analysis tool
for the accurate determination of the response of single degree of
freedom structures. Structures modeled using NONLIN include a
variety of elastic and inelastic systems, including material
nonlinearies due to inelasticity, and geometric nonlinearities due to
buckling response. NONLIN uses a classic step-by-step temporal
integration scheme to solve the resulting nonlinear equations of motion
for the SDOF oscillator, and while NONLIN provides powerful SDOF
analysis capabilities, its intended purpose is to aid in the practical
education of those interested in nonlinear dynamic structural response.
URL's for NONLIN Information
OpenSees
OpenSees (Open System
for Earthquake Engineering Simulation) is a community-developed
software
framework for earthquake engineering applications in structural and
geotechnical engineering. OpenSees include a wide variety of
finite-element analysis capabilities for structural modeling, and
continuum elements appropriate for modeling foundations, and for
performing soil-structure interactions. OpenSees is not an
application in the usual sense, but is instead a community code
framework, so that its core features include support for computational
simulation (e.g., I/O, solvers, element libraries), and its added
features include community-generated applications suites for structural
and geotechnical engineering that permit current capabilities to be
easily extended over time.
URL's for OpenSees Information
QConBridge
QConBridge is an
open-source software tool for the live-load analysis of
highway bridges. A product of the Washington State Department of
Transportations Alternate Route
Project,
QConBridge has an extremely ambitious feature set
intended to provide an integrated analysis and design capability for
bridge engineering practitioners, including generation of live load
cases, extensive plane frame analysis capabilities,
support for SI or English units, a forms-based report generator, and
Windows-style online help features. QConBridge also includes
capabilities for generating visual representations of bridge geometry
and bridge response.
URL's for QConBridge Information
SHAKE
SHAKE is a frequency-domain
analysis for shear-wave propagation in layered soils, and provides for
underlying half-space analysis appropriate for many types of foundation
analyses in earthquake engineering research and practice. In
particular,
SHAKE is a useful tool for analyzing many forms of
soil-structure-interaction problems in earthquake engineering. The
SHAKE program was developed originally by Lysmer, Schnabel, and Seed at
Berkeley, and then extended in the 1990's by Idriss and Sun at UC
Davis.
URL's for SHAKE Information