Earthquake processes are complex physical phenomena which is still not fully understood. In this study, preliminary investigations on a new and alternative numerical approach torwards efficient and effective studying of the physics involved in the earthquake phenomena is reported. A Lattice Solid Model is implemented for the microscopic simulation of the fracture and failure in rocks around the faults. Element-free Galerkin was implemented as the area surrounding the faults at macroscopic scale with linear elastic model. Since the softwares developed by the first and second authors are written in f90 and C++, a job controller and a coupler was developed to run the both codes simultaneously, while transferring physical data such as the displacements and forces to the from each program. This prelimary report emphasizes on the coupling procedures carried out for the two software systems, which is believed to become promising in the future studies of earthquakes involving multi-scale numerical simulations.

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The elastic nonlinear behavior of imperfect circular cylindrical shells under axially compression has been investigated using nonlineair Ritz analysis. It is shown that the lowerbound of elastic buckling loads for increasing the amplitude of initial geometric imperfections exists. The present lowerbound from nonlinear buckling analysis is in good agreement with the estimation of the reduced stiffness method which provides a simple but safe extension to classical bifurcation analysis for the design of even axially compressed orthotropic cylinders.

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