cee200: Structural & Geotechnical Engineering Seminar
UCLA Civil & Environmental Engineering Department

Nonlinear Time-History Analysis of Super-Tall Buildings and Large Cities

Xinzheng Lu, Professor,
Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
luxz@tsinghua.edu.cn | www.luxinzheng.net

Earthquakes severely threaten the safety of super-tall buildings and large cities. Because many modern super-tall buildings (> 500 m) and large cities are lack of sufficient historical earthquake experiences to establish the empirical models, the nonlinear time-history analysis (THA), which strictly follows the fundamentals of structural dynamics, is used in this study to
predict the seismic response of super-tall buildings and tens of thousands of buildings in a city. The proposed model for earthquake-induced collapse simulation of super-tall buildings
has been successfully used in the design of some real-world super-tall buildings (e.g., the 528 m tall Z15 Tower), with significant savings of construction cost, whilst achieving a better
seismic safety. The proposed nonlinear THA of large cities covering multi-fidelity building models, high-performance computing approaches, and realistic visualization techniques delivers several unique advantages: (1) true representation of the characteristic features of individual buildings and ground motions; (2) realistic visualization of earthquake scenarios, particularly dynamic shaking of buildings during earthquakes; (3) detailed prediction of seismic response and losses on each story of every building at any time period. The secondary disasters
such as fire following earthquake and falling debris due to earthquake can also be simulated based on the THA results of buildings. Typical applications including the seismic damage
prediction of selected large cities in China (Beijing, Taiyuan, and Tangshan City) and the United States (the San Francisco Bay Area), as well as the prompt seismic damage evaluation
after earthquakes, are introduced to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed solutions.

Where: Boelter Hall 4275
When: 12 – 2 PM, Monday, April 16

Speaker: Xinzheng Lu is a full Professor and the Head of the Institute of Disaster Prevention and Mitigation of Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Engineering Mechanics journal of China Society of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics. Prof. Lu’s major research interests cover earthquake engineering and collapse prevention of
structures. His publications have received more than 7400 citations in Google Scholar. His research outcomes have been adopted by Chinese national design codes, ACI design
guidelines and some important structural analysis programs. He also participated in the design and construction of several landmark buildings and bridges (e.g., the Beijing Z15 Tower (H = 528 m) and the Runyang Bridge (Main span = 1490 m)) and the emergency earthquake reconnaissance after Wenchuan (2008), Yushu (2010), Lushan (2013), Ludian (2014) and Nepal earthquake (2015). Prof. Lu has received several important awards including the Leading Researcher of “Ten Thousand Talent Program” of China (2016), the Young Scholarship of Cheung Kong Scholars Program of Ministry of Education of China (2015), the National Natural Science Award (Second Prize, 2013), the Excellent Young Scientist Fund of National
Natural Science Foundation of China (2012), and the “Most Cited Chinese Scholars in Civil and Structural field” by Elsevier (from 2014 to 2017)..