Engineering Commons^™

Site Response Zones And Short-Period Earthquake Ground Motion Projections For The Las Vegas Basin, Barbara Luke, Ying Liu

Civil and Environmental Engineering and Construction Faculty Research

A deterministic seismic hazard analysis was conducted to address the effect of local soil conditions on earthquake-induced strong ground motion in the Las Vegas Basin, Nevada (US). Using a large geological and geotechnical database, two response units were defined: a fine-grained unit, predominantly clay; and a coarse-grained unit, predominantly gravel. A moderate number of high-quality shallow shear wave velocity measurements were collected from which characteristic shear wave velocity profiles were developed for each response unit. An equivalent-linear one-dimensional site response model was used. The model was calibrated using a basin-wide, small-strain ground motion database. Calibration tests showed that ground motion …