Seismic assessment of existing heritage buildings remains a challenging task. There is a high level of complexity and uncertainty compared with the assessment of standard buildings. Heritage masonry churches are usually prone to partial collapses during ea ...
Recent estimates of fracture energy G (') in earthquakes show a power-law dependence with slip u which can be summarized as G (') ae u (a) where a is a positive real slightly larger than one. For cracks with sliding friction, fracture energy can be equated ...
Earthquakes are the result of slip along faults and are due to the decrease of rock frictional strength (dynamic weakening) with increasing slip and slip rate. Friction experiments simulating the abrupt accelerations (>>10 m/s(2)), slip rates (similar to 1 ...