Ariane Ducellier

• MS
• PhD Student at University of Washington

The seismic vulnerability of masonry aggregates is assessed with an approach based on the discrete element method. In that purpose, a quasi-static push-over procedure has been developed, in which a load pattern, based on the building first mode of vibration, is applied to the studied structure. Using this approach, the magnitude of the horizontal l...

Seismic risk evaluations play an important role in preparing for future damaging earthquakes and, consequently, over the past couple of decades hundreds of such studies have been conducted. However, the assessment of seismic risk is always associated with significant uncertainties because of a lack of knowledge and data on earthquake hazard, vulner...

We carry out simulations of seismic wave propagation in anelastic media in order to study the relative importance of source parameters as well as viscoelastic structures in affecting the decay of the ground motions. First, we verify the efficiency of the implementation in a finite difference code of two coarse-grain memory variables methods to mode...

The earthquake motion generated by the multiple scattering due to the complexity of the underneath soil structure can be referred to as a diffuse wave field. Under the assumption of the well-diffused wave field it is accepted that the average autocorrelation of a single receiver is proportional to the imaginary part of the Green's function when bot...

Seismic waves radiated from an earthquake propagate in the Earth and the ground shaking is felt and recorded at (or near) the ground surface. Understanding the wave propagation with respect to the Earth's structure and the earthquake mechanisms is one of the main objectives of seismology, and predicting the strong ground shaking for moderate and la...

n the scope of a scenario-based risk analysis, this study aims to quantify and rank various types of epistemic uncertainties that enter into the derivation of fragility functions for common buildings. Using a numerical model of a test structure (a reinforced concrete five-story building with infill panels on the first two floors), a first type of u...

The earthquake motion generated by the multiple scattering due to the complexity of the underneath soil structure can be referred to as a diffuse wave field. Under the assumption of the well-diffused wave field it is accepted that the average autocorrelation of a single receiver is proportional to the imaginary part of the Green’s function when bot...

In this study we focus on sites where the site effect for seismic ground motions can be described using a one dimensional model. Previous studies show that the imaginary part of the Green's function at the free surface is proportional to the square of the absolute value of the corresponding transfer function for a plane, vertically incident wave wi...

The safety study of a CO2 storage site requires the evaluation of the sustainable injection pressure. The faults are generally considered as one of the potential leakage paths as a fault zone could be more permeable than the neighbouring rock matrix. The pressure build up in the reservoir due to the injection procedure changes the stress field with...

Finite difference simulations of seismic wave propagation are performed in the Niigata area, Japan, for the 2007 Mw 6.6 Niigata-ken Chuetsu-Oki earthquake at low frequencies. We test three 3D structural models built independently in various studies. First aftershock simulations are carried out. The model based on 3D tomography yields correct body w...

In this study, the illumination of an observation site from the source is assumed to be produced only by incident plane waves. The average of normalized ground motion spectral densities will then depends only on depth and a one dimensional description of wave propagation for a diffuse field of ground motions can be applied. Thus, the imaginary part...

The objective of the present work is to study the effects of CO2 injection on the hydromechanical behavior of a fault running across a reservoir in view of safety storage risk assessment. At the fault-zone scale, the equivalent permeability of the statistically distributed fractures is modeled by a singular-integral-equations method. At the site sc...

A hybrid method combining finite element and 4th-order finite difference techniques is developed to model SH and P-SV seismic wave propagation in a 2D elastic medium with irregular surface topography. Both the classic staggered grid finite difference scheme and the partially staggered grid scheme are tested. The accuracy of the hybrid method is stu...

We perform a series of simulations of seismic wave propagation from potential earthquakes to evaluate how the 2D (in the NW-SE direction) geological structure of the Friuli (NE Italy) basin affects ground motions, particularly in terms of peak ground velocity (PGV). The decay of PGV with source-receiver distance from the 2D modelling is compared to...

We present a coupled method to simulate elastic wave propagation when taking into account the topography of a free surface. This method combines a finite-elements method (FEM) and a 4th-order velocity-stress staggered-grid finite-difference method (FDM). The aim of this combination of two numerical methods is to keep the advantages of both methods....

The present study provides a set of numerical tools for modeling the geomechanical aspects related to the safety of geological CO2 storage, namely, caprock damage and fault reactivitation due to reservoir pressure rise. Large scale finite element models are used to describe the injection process. The change of the effective stress field is investig...

Parallel computing is widely used for large scale three-dimensional simulation of seismic wave propagation. One particularity of most of these simulations is to consider a finite computing domain whereas the physical problem is unbounded. Additional numerical conditions are then required to absorb the energy at the artificial boundaries, which intr...