Francesca Bozzoni | European Centre for Training & Research in Earthquake Engineering (original) (raw)

Papers by Francesca Bozzoni

The Central Italy earthquake sequence nominally began on 24 August 2016 with a M6.1 event on a no... more The Central Italy earthquake sequence nominally began on 24 August 2016 with a M6.1 event on a normal fault that produced devastating effects in the town of Amatrice and several nearby villages and hamlets. A major international response was undertaken to record the effects of this disaster, including surface faulting, ground motions, landslides, and damage patterns to structures. This work targeted the development of high-value case histories useful to future research. Subsequent events in October 2016 exacerbated the damage in previously affected areas and caused damage to new areas in the north, particularly the relatively large town of Norcia. Additional reconnaissance after a M6.5 event on 30 October 2016 documented and mapped several large landslide features and increased damage states for structures in villages and hamlets throughout the region. This paper provides an overview of the reconnaissance activities undertaken to document and map these and other effects, and highlights valuable lessons learned regarding faulting and ground motions, engineering effects, and emergency response to this disaster.

Geosciences

Liquefaction-induced surface manifestations are the result of a complex geological–geotechnical p... more Liquefaction-induced surface manifestations are the result of a complex geological–geotechnical phenomenon, driven by several controlling factors. We propose a multidisciplinary methodological approach, involving engineering geologists, geomorphologists, sedimentologists, and geotechnical engineers, to build a 3D engineering geological model for liquefaction assessment studies. The study area is Cavezzo (Po Plain, Italy), which is a municipality hit by superficial liquefaction manifestations during the Emilia seismic crisis of May–June 2012. The site is characterized by a Holocene alluvial sequence of the floodplain, fluvial channel, and crevasse splay deposits prone to liquefaction. The integration of different geotechnical investigations, such as boreholes, CPTm, CPTu, and laboratory tests, allowed us to recognize potentially liquefiable lithological units, crucial for hazard assessment studies. The resulting 3D engineering geological model reveals a strict correlation of co-seism...

Infrastructures

This paper aims to investigate the seismic vulnerability of key port infrastructure components by... more This paper aims to investigate the seismic vulnerability of key port infrastructure components by using the outcomes of advanced numerical analysis. For the first time, to the best knowledge of the authors, a pile-supported wharf structure, the soil deposits where the wharf lies, and a crane typically operating on the wharf are numerically modelled as a combined system. The starting point for building the numerical model is the main components of strategic facilities at the port of Gioia Tauro (Italy), which is a strategic hub for container traffic located in one of the most seismically active regions of the Mediterranean Sea. Based on the results obtained from two-dimensional (2D) dynamic analyses, fragility curves were developed for single port components and the wharf-crane-soil system. A scenario-based seismic damage assessment was then exemplified to compare the predictions resulting from the fragility model presented in this work with the relevant data available in the literat...

Sensors

The Internet of things concept empowered by low-cost sensor technologies and headless computers h... more The Internet of things concept empowered by low-cost sensor technologies and headless computers has upscaled the applicability of vibration monitoring systems in recent years. Raspberry Shake devices are among those systems, constituting a crowdsourcing framework and forming a worldwide seismic network of over a thousand nodes. While Raspberry Shake devices have been proven to densify seismograph arrays efficiently, their potential for structural health monitoring (SHM) is still unknown and is open to discovery. This paper presents recent findings from existing buildings located in Bucharest (Romania) equipped with Raspberry Shake 4D (RS4D) devices, whose signal recorded under multiple seismic events has been analyzed using different modal identification algorithms. The obtained results show that RS4D modules can capture the building vibration behavior despite the short-duration and low-amplitude excitation sources. Based on 15 RS4D device readings from five different multistorey bu...

Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Earthquake Geotechnical Engineering, <stron... more Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Earthquake Geotechnical Engineering, <strong>7ICEGE</strong>, Rome (Italy), June 2019

The earthquake was located in a gap between two earlier damaging events, the 1997 M6.1 Umbria-Mar... more The earthquake was located in a gap between two earlier damaging events, the 1997 M6.1 Umbria-Marche earthquake to the northwest and the 2009 M6.1 L'Aquila earthquake to the southeast. This gap had been recognized prior to the event as a zone of elevated risk (GdL Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, hereafter INGV, 2016). The present event and those that preceded it occurred along the spine of the Apennine Mountain range on normal faults and had rake angles ranging from-80 to-100. Each of these events produced substantial damage to local towns and villages; the present event most strongly affected Arquata del Tronto, Accumoli, Amatrice, and Pescara del Tronto, with a loss of life as of this writing of 294, generally from collapses of unreinforced masonry dwellings. The NSF-funded Geotechnical Extreme Events Reconnaissance (GEER) association, with cofunding from the B. John Garrick Institute for the Risk Sciences at UCLA and the NSF I/UCRC Center for Unmanned Aircraft Systems (C-UAS) at BYU, mobilized a US-based team to the area from 5-9 September 2016. The US team worked in close collaboration with Italian researchers organized under the auspices of the Italian Geotechnical Society, the Italian Center for Seismic Microzonation and its Applications, the Consortium ReLUIS, Centre of Competence of Department of Civil Protection and the DIsaster RECovery Team of Politecnico di Torino. The objective of the Italy-US GEER team was to collect and document perishable data that is essential to advance knowledge of earthquake effects, which ultimately leads to improved procedures for characterization and mitigation of seismic risk.

I contenuti di questo report sono tutelati dalla licenza Creative Commons 4.0 International (CC B... more I contenuti di questo report sono tutelati dalla licenza Creative Commons 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). Il permesso di utilizzare tali contenuti viene concesso con il pieno riconoscimento della fonte, utilizzando la seguente citazione raccomandata:

Bulletin of Earthquake Engineering, 2020

Microzonation for earthquake-induced liquefaction hazard is the subdivision of a territory at a m... more Microzonation for earthquake-induced liquefaction hazard is the subdivision of a territory at a municipal or submunicipal scale in areas characterized by the same probability of liquefaction manifestation for the occurrence of an earthquake of specified intensity. The liquefaction hazard at a site depends on the severity of expected ground shaking as well as on the susceptibility to liquefaction of that site. This in turn depends on geological, geomorphological, hydrogeological and geotechnical predisposing factors. Thus, liquefaction hazard implies the existence of territories characterized by a moderate to high level of intensity of expected ground shaking. Microzonation charts for ground shaking and liquefaction hazard play a key role for the mitigation of seismic risk of an urban centre as they provide a valuable tool for the implementation of prevention strategies and land use planning. The LIQUEFACT project fully addressed the problem of microzoning a territory for earthquake-induced liquefaction hazard in a specific work package. Four municipal testing areas were selected across Europe as peculiar case studies where to construct microzonation charts for earthquake-induced liquefaction hazard. They are located in Emilia-Romagna region (Italy), Lisbon metropolitan area (Portugal), Brežice territory (Slovenia) and Marmara region (Turkey). Their location was identified based on the following criteria: severity of expected seismic hazard, availability of geological and geotechnical data, presence of liquefiable soil deposits, documented cases of liquefaction manifestations occurred in historical earthquakes, representativeness of different geological settings, density of population in selected areas (exposure). This paper illustrates the general procedure developed in LIQUEFACT for the assessment of earthquake-induced liquefaction hazard at urban scale and presents the main achievements of the microzonation studies carried out at the four previously mentioned European testbeds. Since the microzonation studies have been carried out using a shared framework and methodology, this paper has the ambition to serve as technical guidelines for updating the standards and the operational criteria currently used in different countries worldwide to construct seismic microzonation maps of liquefaction hazard.

Soil Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering, 2020

Abstract We present the results of the numerical simulation of the May 29, 2012 Emilia Romagna ea... more Abstract We present the results of the numerical simulation of the May 29, 2012 Emilia Romagna earthquake in Northern Italy using an approach that computes synthetic seismograms associated to earthquake scenarios by combining broadband synthetic seismograms (0–10 Hz) obtained using the UCSB broadband code with nonlinear ground response analyses carried out using the program NOAH. The comparison with the recorded waveforms allowed validating the predictive capability of the adopted method in the proximity of the epicenter. The main limitation of the study is the inappropriateness of 1D modeling in a region characterized by a steep variation of the roof of the buried bedrock.

Earthquake Spectra, 2018

Seismological Research Letters, 2016

ABSTRACT A low‐magnitude regional ground‐motion prediction equation (GMPE) for peak ground accele... more ABSTRACT A low‐magnitude regional ground‐motion prediction equation (GMPE) for peak ground acceleration and 5% damped spectral acceleration at 11 oscillator periods ranging from 0.1 to 3 s was developed for applications of the earthquake early warning system operating in southern Italy. The accelerometric dataset was built out of 2270 waveforms from 319 earthquakes with local magnitude ranging from 1.5 to 4.2, recorded from 60 stations located on soil type B, according to the Italian Building Code and Eurocode 8, with hypocentral distances ranging from 3 to about 100 km. The GMPE coefficients were computed through a nonlinear weighted damped least‐squares algorithm, attributing a higher weight to ground‐motion data recorded at stations for which soil category was established using geotechnical and geophysical measurements. Predictions of the proposed GMPE were tested against independent ground‐motion data recorded in southern Italy and compared with other regional and global GMPEs through the log‐likelihood method. The comparison shows that the proposed GMPE performs better than any other GMPE considered in this study.

Engineering Geology for Society and Territory - Volume 5, 2014

The study presented here evaluates the ground motion amplification effects at the site of San Fel... more The study presented here evaluates the ground motion amplification effects at the site of San Felice Martire church, a historical construction located at Poggio Picenze (L’Aquila, Italy). To characterize the soil profile at the site of investigation field geological observations, boreholes and geophysical tests from previous campaigns were gathered. Dynamic soil properties of the identified soil profile were obtained by the test results from selected literature. Then, the amplification effects at San Felice church’s site was estimated using fully 1D stochastic site response analyses and for the object motion seven real records compatible to the Italian code-based spectrum referred to 475-year return period. The set of real records was downloaded from SEISM-HOME web portal. The stochastic analyses allowed to simulate 1,000 different soil profiles and to run 1,000 simulations, taking into account the inherent variability and uncertainty in the soil profile and on the seismic demand.

Engineering Geology, 2013

ABSTRACT The amplification of the ground motion at the surface is greatly influenced by the geote... more ABSTRACT The amplification of the ground motion at the surface is greatly influenced by the geotechnical characteristics of the soil formations below the ground surface. Traditionally, analyses of the ground response are deterministic, which means no consideration of the aleatory nature of geotechnical parameters of soil layers like density, shear wave velocity, etc. A fully stochastic procedure for estimating the site amplification of ground motion allows taking into account the record-to-record variability in an input ground motion and the uncertainty in dynamic soil properties and in the definition of the soil model. In particular, their effect on response spectra at the ground surface can be evaluated. With this procedure, it is pretended to reduce the aleatory variability into the soil model. In this work, the soil profile below the San Felice Martire church, at Poggio Picenze (L&#39;Aquila area, Abruzzo, Central Italy), has been studied basically on field geologic observations and drilling and geophysical tests retrieved from previous investigation campaigns. The dynamic soil properties were obtained by literature and by the test results. Amplification effects at the site under investigation have been estimated using fully 1D stochastic site response analyses and for the object motion 7 real records compatible to the Italian code-based spectrum referred to 475-year return period. The Italian building code defines the reference seismic action in terms of elastic acceleration response spectra derived from the results of a probabilistic seismic hazard study. The results in terms of accelerograms and acceleration response spectrum (with the associated dispersion) indicated a clear amplification of the input motion at the basement of San Felice Martire church due to the lithostratigraphic characteristics of the soil deposits at the site under investigation.

Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, 2011

A probabilistic seismic hazard analysis has been performed to compute probabilistic seismic hazar... more A probabilistic seismic hazard analysis has been performed to compute probabilistic seismic hazard maps for the eastern Caribbean region (10°N-19°N, 59°W-64°W), which includes in the north the Leeward Islands (from Anguilla to Dominica) and in the south the Windward Islands (from Martinique to Grenada), Barbados, Trinidad, and Tobago. The analysis has been conducted using a standard logic-tree approach that allowed systematically taking into account the model-based (i.e., epistemic) uncertainty and its influence on the computed ground motion parameters. Hazard computations have been performed using a grid of sites with a space resolution of 0.025 degrees covering the territory of the considered islands. Two different computation methodologies have been adopted: the standard Cornell-McGuire approach (Cornell, 1968; McGuire, 1976) based on the definition of appropriate seismogenic zones (SZ), and the zone-free approach developed by Woo (1996), which overcomes the ambiguities related with the definition of seismic sources. The interplay and complexities between shallow crustal, intraplate, and interface subduction seismicity of the Caribbean region have been thoroughly investigated. By merging all available databases, a comprehensive and updated earthquake catalog for the region has been compiled. Also, a thorough investigation has been undertaken to identify the most suitable ground motion prediction equations to be used in the analyses. Uniform hazard spectra have been calculated for the horizontal component of ground motion (rock and level site conditions), 4 return periods (RP) (95-, 475-, 975-, and 2475-yr), and 22 spectral accelerations (SA) with structural periods ranging from 0 to 3 s. SAs at 0.2 and 1.0 s for 2475-yr RP have been calculated to allow the definition of seismic hazard in the region of study according to the International Building Code (IBC, International Code Council [ICC], 2009).

dist.unina.it

... Earthquake Engineering, EUCENTRE, Pavia, Italy. W. Salazar, J. Latchman, L. Lynch & R. Ro... more ... Earthquake Engineering, EUCENTRE, Pavia, Italy. W. Salazar, J. Latchman, L. Lynch & R. Robertson Seismic Research Centre - The University of the West Indies (UWI), St Augustine, Trinidad. ABSTRACT: The aim of this paper ...

The GEER Association is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) through the Geotechnic... more The GEER Association is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) through the Geotechnical Engineering Program under Grant No. CMMI-1266418. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF. The GEER Association is made possible by the vision and support of the NSF Geotechnical Engineering Program Directors: Dr. Richard Fragaszy and the late Dr. Cliff Astill. GEER members also donate their time, talent, and resources to collect time-sensitive field observations of the effects of extreme events. Sponsorship of GEER activities was also provided by the B. John Garrick Institute for the Risk Sciences at UCLA and the NSF I/UCRC Center for Unmanned Aircraft Systems (C-UAS) at BYU under Project BYU13-03. We thank Prof. Mauro Dolce and Engs. Paola Pagliara and Paola Bertuccioli from the Department of Civil Protection for their support and assistance. Matteo Francesco Stancato, master's student at Università della Calabria, contributed to data collection for building structures. We thank Giuseppe Riccioni (Ussita Municipality), Roberto Cantoni, and Raffaele Sorriento (Corpo Nazionale dei Vigili del Fuoco) for allowing surveys at Monte Bove northern flank and Valle di Panico. Eng. Monica Di Mattia (Teramo Province) supported survey activities in Crognaleto. Organizations within Italy that supported the activities reported herein include the Italian Geotechnical Society; the Consortium ReLUIS (Network of Italian Laboratories of Earthquake Engineering), headquartered in the

Sommario Il 20 maggio 2012 un terremoto di magnitudo 5.9 ha colpito la regione Emilia-Romagna, ne... more Sommario Il 20 maggio 2012 un terremoto di magnitudo 5.9 ha colpito la regione Emilia-Romagna, nel Nord Italia. Effetti di liquefazione sono stati osservati in molti Comuni, da quelli più vicini all'epicentro (ad es. San Felice sul Panaro) a Sant'Agostino, dove essi si sono manifestati in modo più marcato. La frazione di San Carlo, nel Comune di Sant'Agostino, a circa 17 km dall'epicentro, è stata interessata dai fenomeni di liquefazione più severi. Nelle aree di San Carlo maggiormente colpite sono stati osservati vulcanelli di sabbia, cedimenti del terreno, fratture ed espansione laterale del suolo con effetti anche sulle strutture ed infrastrutture. Vengono qui illustrati i risultati dei rilievi geotecnici, svolti a San Carlo dalla squadra di ricognizione "Geo" di Eucentre dopo la scossa del 20 maggio. Sono state effettuate misure sul campo in 4 siti per valutare l'incidenza del fenomeno della liquefazione nelle zone maggiormente colpite di San Carlo....

Emilia-Romagna Region in northern Italy (Figure 1a), caus-ing severe shaking throughout a relativ... more Emilia-Romagna Region in northern Italy (Figure 1a), caus-ing severe shaking throughout a relatively large portion of the Po Plain territory. The epicenter of this May 20, 2012,