Quantitative Estimation of Site Effects in the City of Arica By the Spectral Element Method

Abstract eng:
Chile lies on the contact between the Nazca and South American plates, making it one of the most seismic countries in the world. In recent years, several studies have been carried out with the purpose of characterizing the dynamic properties of the soils of the most populated cities in the north of Chile. The purpose of this work is to estimate, by numerical modeling, the seismic amplification of a dense populated area of the city of Arica. Spatial distribution of main soil dynamic properties have been obtained from a detailed geophysical survey, including surface-wave based methods and gravimetry. To estimate the site effects, we solve the wave propagation equation in full heterogeneous media by the Spectral Element Method (SEM). This method allows including the topography, the irregular contact between soils and bedrock and heterogeneities of main materials properties along the computational domain. The inelastic behavior of the soil has been considered, using stiffness degradation and damping curves. The computations were done using the high performance open-source numerical code “SPEED” [1], which can solve the problem in parallel computers. Results of the distribution of the Peak Ground Acceleration (PGA) and other strong-motion indicators are compared against standard 1D horizontally layered modeling.

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