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

http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/~rlt/feap/


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

http://civil.eng.buffalo.edu/idarc2d50/
http://civil.eng.buffalo.edu/idarc-bridge/


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

http://www.app1.fema.gov/emi/nonlin.htm


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

http://opensees.berkeley.edu/


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

http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/eesc/bridge/software/


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

http://nisee.berkeley.edu/software/shake91/