Abstract
Recent large earthquakes, such as Kocaeli in Turkey and Chi-Chi in Taiwan, produced earthquake surface fault, which damaged many near-by structures due to displacement. It is thus required to consider such damage due to faulting in design structures since faulting is not a subject of design codes. The objective of this paper is to qualitatively evaluate the influence of vertical fault movements, in order to clarify the faulting mechanism as a fundamental element for establishing design codes. A series of model experiments are being made for this purpose. Surface deposit in which a fault propagates is modeled as a set of aluminum rods. As well as deformation of rods are measured, stress acting on the base are measured. It is shown that a large moment works at the tip of the fault, which drives the fault propagation. It is also shown that depending on the fault type, the fault propagation changes and there is some common tendency for it. Although these results are for model experiments, they will serve as basic findings for faulting.
