2020 Volume 20 Issue 1 Pages 1_13-1_25
A reliable estimation of surface fault displacements is necessary for the safety of infrastructures and buildings. It is essential to consider various uncertainties in the fault rupture process for the reliable estimation. In this study, the effect of material uncertainties on fault displacements is studied by performing repetitive simulations using Latin hypercube sampling. The convergence of probabilistic responses versus the number of samples is analyzed by simulations with multiple sample sets. It is shown that the critical base slip that makes the rupture reach the ground surface are strongly affected by material uncertainties. The probabilistic distribution of the critical base slip can be approximated by the lognormal distribution well when the material properties are assumed to be log normal random variables. The mean and the standard deviation were estimated with a few cm errors from results of 230 simulations by conducting ten simulations when the material properties have coefficients of variance of less than 0.3.
