Analytical fragility curves of a structure subject to tsunami waves using smooth particle hydrodynamics

Abstract

This study presents a new method to computes analytical fragility curves of a structure subject to tsunami waves. The method uses dynamic analysis at each stage of the computation. First, the smooth particle hydrodynamics (SPH) model simulates the propagation of the tsunami waves from shallow water to their impact on the target structure. The advantage of SPH over mesh based methods is its capability to model wave surface interaction when large deformations are involved, such as the impact of water on a structure. Although SPH is computationally more expensive than mesh based method, nowadays the advent of parallel computing on general purpose graphic processing unit overcome this limitation. Then, the impact force is applied to a finite element model of the structure and its dynamic non-linear response is computed. When a data-set of tsunami waves is used analytical fragility curves can be computed. This study proves it is possible to obtain the response of a structure to a tsunami wave using state of the art dynamic models in every stage of the computation at an affordable cost.