PROPOSAL OF EVALUATION METHOD FOR ANTI-CATASTROPHE PERFORMANCE OF RAILWAY STRUCTURES IN SEISMIC DESIGN

Abstract

 The 2011 Tohoku Earthquake occurred and research has been started how to deal with the “unexpected large earthquake” in seismic design. The seismic design standard of railway facilities in Japan was revised in September 2012. In the seismic design code, the concept of “anti-catastrophe” was first introduced. However, a method to directly define and evaluate the “anti-catastrophe” was not built at the time, so it stayed at the consideration items. Therefore, in this research, a method to evaluate the “anti-catastrophe” was developed, which is indicated by the seismic design code. First, we identify the situation (crisis) to be avoided and the scenario leading to it, and quantitatively evaluate the ability to avoid the crisis based on the scenario. Since it is common that there are multiple situations to be avoided, “anti-catastrophe” value is quantified by weighting the impact of the crisis and adding together. In addition, calculation was performed using simple examples and the effectiveness of the method was demonstrated.