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. For more information about Shake (Schnabel et al.), please visit http://nisee.berkeley.edu/elibrary/getdoc?id=SHAKE91ZIP.

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.

Installation of ShakeBoreholes

Download file ShakeBoreholes1.2.zip (224 kB), and uncompress it to one folder:

Running ShakeBoreholes

Double-click ShakeBoreholes.exe

Usage

1. Copy the template Excel file "Borehole Template.xls" to a new name (e.g. "Boreholes.xls");
2. Open the copied Excel file, and choose "Enable Macros" in the warning box;
3. Fill in the boreholes in the Excel file;
4. Click on "Save Txt" to save a Tab delimited text file containing the borehole data;
5. Start ShakeBoreholes.exe;
6. Choose the borehole file saved in step 4;
7. Note the choice related to the data of the 5th column. Also note the choice regarding S.I. or English units;
8. Fill in all other data in the form (or confirm that the defaults are OK);
9. Press "Shake it!".

If all went OK, the output folder will contain all input and output files for all boreholes.
As it might be a lot of work to fill in the parameters of the ShakeBoreholes form, there is an option to save them to file (File, Save Project...) and retrieve them at a later stage (File, Open Project...)

Disclaimer

Both programmes are distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Notes - known issues

1. An attempt is made to auto-detect the values (header lines, format etc.) of the input motion file. Confirm that the auto-detect worked correctly.
2. Although Shake.exe can handle long file names, there is a limit in the length of the file names. For now the error handling of this is not so sophisticated. Make sure the total path/file length of the borehole and the input motion file does not exceed 70 characters.
3. Excel files cannot be read directly. They MUST be saved as tab-delimited text files. This can easily be done with the button on the top-left of the first sheet ("Save Txt").
4. Only the first 6 columns in the borehole table are read by ShakeBoreholes (as given in the template). This means that you are free to add more columns to assist calculation of the first 6 columns.
5. To help filling the Excel file, the 2nd sheet ("Material Properties") contains the match between each material and their curves. If in column G of the first sheet ("Boreholes") the same names are used for material, the curves are automatically copied to columns B and C.
6. The available values for columns B and C in sheet "Material Properties" are taken from file shakey2k.mat and stored in hidden columns D and E.
7. Columns B and C of sheet "Boreholes" contain formulas that automatically take the curve information from the other sheet. In the template the formulas are only copied to the first 8 rows. While column G is still empty, the value is #N/A. For more boreholes, just copy/paste the formulas to more rows. You can have many thousands of rows.
8. The borehole ID becomes part of the output filename when pressing "Shake it!".
9. The borehole ID can be repeated on every line, but this is optional. It is only required for every new borehole in the table.

Contact

• Dr. C.J. (Cees) van Westen, email: westen@itc.nl
• Ir. S. (Siefko) Slob, email: slob@itc.nl