The damage to hillside embankments in Sendai city during The 2011 off the Pacific Coast of Tohoku Earthquake

AbstractThe 2011 off the Pacific Coast of Tohoku Earthquake resulted in severe damage to housing and housing lots. In particular, the hillside embankments for residential use surrounding the downtown of Sendai city suffered serious damage. Many hillside lands which had been damaged during the 1978 off Miyagi-Prefecture earthquake were subjected to further damage. Typical damaged hillside embankments in Sendai city were investigated and the causes of the damage were discussed in this paper. The main cause of the damage to housing was not the seismic motion but the ground displacement of the fill embankment. A comparison of the damage from the 2011 earthquake with that from the 1978 earthquake indicates that the countermeasures constructed after the 1978 earthquake performed well in that they prevented large landslide type failure; however, they were not successful in reducing the amount of damage to housing or housing lots due to ground displacements from cracks, differential settlement, and shallow slips. A classification of failure types of fill embankment is proposed to be of assistance in the choice of countermeasures

Fabrication of single-crystalline plasmonic nanostructures on transparent and flexible amorphous substrates

A new experimental technique is developed for producing a high-performance single-crystalline Ag nanostructure on transparent and flexible amorphous substrates for use in plasmonic sensors and circuit components. This technique is based on the epitaxial growth of Ag on a (001)-oriented single-crystalline NaCl substrate, which is subsequently dissolved in ultrapure water to allow the Ag film to be transferred onto a wide range of different substrates. Focused ion beam milling is then used to create an Ag nanoarray structure consisting of 200 cuboid nanoparticles with a side length of 160 nm and sharp, precise edges. This array exhibits a strong signal and a sharp peak in plasmonic properties and Raman intensity when compared with a polycrystalline Ag nanoarray

Design of polarization splitter and rotator using function-expansion based topology optimization considering two-layer structure

Function expansion based topology optimization method for optical waveguide devices has been proposed as an automatic design method which can produce an optimal device structure having an arbitrary topology. In this paper, we aim to extend the function expansion based topology optimization method to the design problems of three-dimensional photonic devices with structural variation in the depth direction. We confirm the effectiveness of our approach through the design example of the polarization splitter and rotator which utilizes structural asymmetry in the depth direction

Sensitivity of tsunami wave profiles and inundation simulations to earthquake slip and fault geometry for the 2011 Tohoku earthquake

In this study, we develop stochastic random-field slip models for the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and conduct a rigorous sensitivity analysis of tsunami hazards with respect to the uncertainty of earthquake slip and fault geometry. Synthetic earthquake slip distributions generated from the modified Mai-Beroza method captured key features of inversion-based source representations of the mega-thrust event, which were calibrated against rich geophysical observations of this event. Using original and synthesised earthquake source models (varied for strike, dip, and slip distributions), tsunami simulations were carried out and the resulting variability in tsunami hazard estimates was investigated. The results highlight significant sensitivity of the tsunami wave profiles and inundation heights to the coastal location and the slip characteristics, and indicate that earthquake slip characteristics are a major source of uncertainty in predicting tsunami risks due to future mega-thrust events

Is flow velocity important in tsunami empirical fragility modeling?

The influence of flow velocity on structural damage induced by tsunami inundation is investigated to improve empirical fragility models considering flow velocity as explanatory hazard variable in addition to inundation depth. The analysis is based on extensive tsunami damage data for the 2011 Tohoku earthquake collected by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transportation of the Japanese Government. Multivariate tsunami fragility curves are developed through multinomial logistic regression of un-binned data. This approach facilitates the flexible development of various nested models considering inundation depth alone or inundation depth and velocity altogether. Statistical diagnostic metrics, such as the Bayesian Information Criterion, the Akaike Information Criterion, and the residual deviance, are used to determine which model improves the predictability of tsunami damage. The significance and importance of including flow velocity in the vulnerability models are assessed quantitatively by examining the influence of different spatial resolutions in elevation model and different source models. Then, the effects of coastal topography have been investigated. Numerical results show that flow velocity generally improves the fragility models, particularly for severer structural damage states, and that it is important for sites along the coast where the inundation depth is not extremely high. Coarse digital elevation model and inaccurate source models have influence on the calculated values of flow velocity and thus they affect the accuracy of fragility modeling. Finally, two different fragility models are calibrated for plain-type and ria-type coasts by reflecting differences in hydrodynamic behavior and recorded damage on the structures