The reason of this new book is to provide an elementary but comprehensive textbook for courses of Earthquake Engineering, providing the latest updates in the field, in a simple way. No previous knowledge of structural dynamics is assumed making this book suitable for the reader learning the subject for the first time. With respect to other classical books in Dynamic of Structures, the current book emphasizes the application of energy methods and the analyses in the frequency domain with the correspoding visualization in the Gauss-Argant Plan. Emphasis is also given to the applications of numerical methods (section 3.4) for the solution of the equation of motions and to the ground motion selection (Part 4) to be used in time history analysis of structures used in current practice due to the increasing computational power of computers in the last decade.
Gian Paolo Cimellaro is Visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and on leave from the Department of Civil Engineering of the Politecnico di Torino (Italy) where he is Associate Professor. He obtained his M.S. (2005) and Ph.D. (2008) from the University at Buffalo (SUNY) in USA. He is the Chair of the ASCE Committee on “Disaster Resilience of Structures, Infrastructures and Communities” in USA.
In 2015, he has received the Seed Grant Award from the Siebel Energy Institute of UC Berkeley. In 2011, he has received the Fib Achievement Award for Young Engineers. Prof. Cimellaro research interests address Earthquake Engineering with emphasis to community resilience to natural disasters such as earthquakes. Recently he has been awarded a grant of 1.3 M € by the European Research Council for the research project “IDEAL RESCUE: Integrated Design and control of sustainable communities During emergencies” ERC-2014-StG (2015-2019).
Sebastiano Marasco is currently Ph.D. student at the Politecnico di Torino (Italy). He received his master degree in Civil Engineering from the Politecnico di Torino in 2014. His Thesis focused on the seismic signal analysis, and he has implemented a software framework for earthquake record processing and selection adopted in the academic context as didactic instrument for the complete seismic action definition for the structural design. His expertise is in the advanced Matlab programming, in the seismic design of reinforced concrete buildings and in the F.E.M. structural applications.
He is interested in particular in the seismic input definition used in the nonlinear response analysis of the structures and in soil response analyses.