Yossef H Hatzor

The numerical Discontinuous Deformation Analysis (DDA) method was used for
back analysis of structural failures in archaeological sites along the active Dead Sea rift system in Israel and preliminary constraints on historical seismic ground motions were obtained.
Two validations were first performed for calibration purposes: 1) The well studied case of a block on an inclined plane was re-studied and a much greater accuracy was obtained for the dynamic case with respect to previous publications, 2) The dynamic displacement of the foundation of a structure was simulated by inducing time-dependant displacements into the foundation block and studying the response of the overlying block.
Two case studies are presented in the paper, in which historic masonry structures were modeled and both synthetic and real earthquake records were applied as loading functions. The response of the structures was studied up to the point of incipient failure in a mechanism similar to the one observed in the field. In both case studies the dynamic analysis was found to provide more complete and accurate results than the pseudo-static solution. Therefore, we believe that such an approach can be employed, where relevant, to provide constraints on paleo-seismic ground motions and consequently on expected PGA values in seismically active regions.