QuakeCoRE Seminar – 1 May 2020

10 am Friday 1st May

Tsunami Impacts on New Zealand Wharf Structures: A First-Principles Approach    

Abstract 

Tsunami have become a natural hazard of focus in recent years as a result of large and damaging events such as the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, the 2011 Tohoku Tsunami, and the 2018 Palu Tsunami.  Though most tsunami in New Zealand have been insignificant in scale, damaging ones have occurred as well along our coastlines.  Ports are one category of infrastructure that presents a particularly great risk from tsunami impacts as a result of their inherent position along the coast and their prominence in supporting economic and social well-being.  Ports entail a wide variety of infrastructure components in terms of functionality and structural characteristics but one of the most fundamental components is wharves, damage to which would compromise the operability of the entire port.  This research sought to provide a comprehensive evaluation of the structural impacts on New Zealand wharves from tsunami.  As no existing studies have provided a similarly comprehensive assessment, a first principles approach was adopted in which information about New Zealand wharves was compiled, tsunami load characteristics were defined from literature and experimental studies, site-specific propagation models were developed in order to determine associated hazard parameters, and computational structural wharf models were developed and analysed against the loading characteristics.  All of this information was then brought together to provide a better understanding of tsunami impacts on wharves in general as well as on specific New Zealand port locations.

For details on how to join the seminar – return to the 2020 Seminar series home page link

Zoom link