Anne S. Kiremidjian

The C. L. Peck, Class of 1906 Professor in Engineering
Department of Civil Engineering and Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability
Stanford University, Stanford, CA

Time-Dependent Earthquake Risk Assessment Modeling with Life-Cycle Analysis
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Friday, October 27, 2023 - 4:30 pm

Location: Lecture live streamed

Anne S. Kiremidjian is the C. L. Peck, Class of 1906 Professor in the School of Engineering at Stanford University where she teaches and conducts research on earthquake hazard, risk, and resilience modeling, and structural health monitoring for extreme events. She and her students have developed some of the first seismic hazard maps for California and all countries in Central America except Mexico, time-dependent earthquake occurrence models, dynamics based analytical fragility functions for buildings, and time-dependent fragility functions for deteriorating structures. In 1985 together with her students and faculty from electrical and mechanical engineering, she developed the first wireless accelerometer and the overall concept of wireless structural health monitoring for which Stanford holds a patent. Her research is published in more than 350 articles. She was the director of the John. A. Blume Earthquake Engineering Center at Stanford and has served on numerous committees and boards at Stanford, various university consortia and national and international organizations. She was a co-founder of two technology companies – K2 Technologies, Inc. and Sensametrics, Inc. She has given more than 40 invited, keynote and distinguished lectures. Dr. Kiremidjian has been recognized with the Extraordinary Achievement Award in Loss Estimation from Applied Technology Council, the C. Martin Duke Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers, the John Fritz Medal (one of the highest honors across all of engineering) from the American Association of Engineering Societies, the Lifetime Achievement Award in Structural Health Monitoring, and the Egleston Medal from Columbia University. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, Distinguished Member of the American Society of Civil Engineers, and Honorary Member of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute.

Time-Dependent Earthquake Risk Assessment Modeling with Life-Cycle Analysis. Earthquake risk assessment models have ignored structural deterioration and regional infrastructure growth over time. The risk is dynamic and has to consider the time dependence of large earthquake occurrences, structural deterioration, seismic design code changes, and increase in building stock over time. A time-dependent earthquake risk model is developed by our research team that considers the problem of increasing vulnerability of structures due to corrosion and contributions to the risk by various environmental factors. Key time dependent risk components include the earthquake hazard rate, the probability distribution of structural capacity given the earthquake demand and the decision variable dependence on monetary discount rates. Life-cycle cost analysis is used to evaluate the contribution of different repair components after every damaging earthquake event. Components in the life-cycle impact analysis include estimation of greenhouse gas potential, ozone depletion potential, acidification potential and several others. Results from applications of the methodology to a single reinforced concrete bridge column show that structural deterioration does contribute to the risk over time and if ignored can result in underestimation of that risk. Moreover, the risk significantly decreases with improved seismic design. Similarly, the contribution of various life-cycle impacts is most pronounced for older structures that have greater potential for deterioration.