Earthquake Modelling

Dr. Motazedian introduced a successful earthquake modelling technique EXSIM (EXtended Finite Fault SIMulation) based on an innovative and original concept of the dynamic corner frequency of earthquakes (Motazedian and Atkinson, 2005). EXSIM is an internationally recognized and robust earthquake modelling method, which has been requested and used by seismologists, graduate students, and engineers from at least 28 countries in the worldwide community of seismologists.

His technique has been used since 2005 and has been updated by him, his former Ph.D. student (Crane and Motazedian, 2014, attached) and many other seismologists.  Download EXSIM_Beta After downloading please send an email to Dr. Dariush Motazedian because he would like to keep track of EXSIM users for future correspondence, in case of any upgrade version. If any third party is interested in EXSIM, please forward them to our websites. We appreciate your cooperation on this matter.

Below are some of the major EXSIM applications.

National Building Code of Canada (NBCC) applications: EXSIM has been used to develop 1,620 strong motion earthquake recordings for the NBCC (Assatourians and Atkinson, 2010; Atkinson, 2009). The recordings were simulated in 2009; however, they have been recommended for the new 2015 version of the NBCC.

Southern California Earthquake Center applications: The Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), which is internationally regarded as the foremost research centre in the field of seismology evaluated the performance of five well-known and original earthquake modelling techniques. In 2011, EXSIM was one of the techniques that was evaluated (Baker et al., 2014; Burks and Baker, 2014). In the SCEC validations of EXSIM, three sets of earthquakes from California, Japan, and Eastern North America were simulated using magnitudes, fault geometry, and reference site conditions as specified by SCEC (Goulet et al., 2015). SCEC concluded that “EXSIM works well at reproducing earthquake recordings in a variety of settings, over a broad range of magnitudes, distances, and periods.” (Atkinson and Assatourians, 2015).

Nuclear Power Plant applications: EXSIM has been used to investigate and assess earthquake hazards for the design of different types of structures used in nuclear power plants (Rastogi and Chhatre, 2014; Singh et al., 2011).

Web repository of synthetic waveforms (SYNTHESIS): This repository archives and distributes synthetic waveforms computed by physic-based models (D’Amico et al., 2016). To date, SYNTHESIS includes more than 4,500 simulated accelerograms computed by different simulation techniques, including EXSIM, deterministic-stochastic, purely deterministic, and broadband approaches.

Other Applications: EXSIM has been used and cited by seismologists from many countries (due to a lack of space just one citation per country is mentioned): Australia (McPherson and Allen, 2006), China (Shen et al., 2014), Costa Rica (Fernández, 2009), Ethiopia (Yoseph and Ramana, 2008), Greece (Kkallas et al., 2015), Iceland (Ólafsson and Sigbjörnsson, 2013), India (Harbindu and Sharma, 2012), Iran (Zafarani et al., 2015), Italy (Smerzini et al., 2012), Japan (Ghofrani et al., 2013), Kyrgyzstan (Picozzi et al., 2013), Malta (Farrugia et al., 2016 ), Mexico (Rodríguez-Pérez et al., 2012), Nepal (Shen et al., 2017), New Zealand (Holden et al., 2013), Portugal (Carvalho et al., 2009), Romania (Pavel et al., 2016), Taiwan (Chen et al., 2017), Turkey (Akinci et al., 2013), Spain (Scarfi et al., 2016), and Switzerland (Edwards and Fäh, 2013). Furthermore, EXSIM has been also requested by many engineers and seismologists from Algeria, Colombia, Finland, France, Pakistan, and the Philippines.