ShakeBoreholes
Spatially simulate the amplification effects of soils in the case of an earthquake
ShakeBoreholes is a program which allows users to spatially simulate the amplification effects of soils in the case of an earthquake. ShakeBoreholes opens a borehole table (a file in tab-delimited text format), reads the soil information for the boreholes and then repeatedly calls Shake.exe to calculate the earthquake response for each borehole.
Shake is a program, last updated in 1992 but originally coded in 1970 by P.B. Schnabel and J. Lysmer (University of California, Berkeley), that calculates earthquake amplification by a soil column using a 1-dimensional approach. The input is a strong motion seismogram and several soil properties at different depths (borehole data). The output is the peak acceleration, response spectrum and several other parameters and curves characterising the soil motion.
This program is difficult to use because all input has to be typed manually into specially formatted text files, while the borehole data is mostly available in Microsoft Excel tables. Shake is a program for the 1-D analysis of geotechnical earthquake engineering problems.
More information about Shake (Schnabel et al.).
In order to solve the time-consuming and error-prone problem of manually composing the Shake input files for each borehole where an earthquake should be simulated, a user-friendlier program was created. This new program, ShakeBoreholes, is a Windows program that iterates over the boreholes (from a Microsoft Excel table) and repeatedly calls Shake to generate the output.
The ShakeBoreholes software was developed as part of the research project Strengthening Local Authorities in Risk Management.