The gentlemen before me gave good advices, however we already know how to build safer buildings and to prevent deaths, now it's time to focus on the ways to reduce overall risk and reduce dollars and downtime losses
In my opinion the real deal here are probabilistic seismic risk analyses for critical infrastructure. Seismic PRAs exist for many years for nuclear power plants and they are slowly progressing into large dams, bridges, petrochemical plants etc. However there are many other critical infrastructures prone to earthquake damage in the IT, financial, commercial, public health etc. These infrastructures house a great number of very expensive equipment which is usually sensitive to vibrations and need adequate fragility and vulnerability assessment.
There is a technique to enlarge the steps of digitized excitation, such that the errors in the time integration analysis does change considerably compared to analysis with the steps of the digitized excitation. This technique is suggested in 2008 and since then is successfully (mostly more than 50% reduction of run time) applied to many seismic analyses, e.g. frames, buildings, bridges, silos, and the telecommunication tower of Tehran, in both linear and nonlinear cases, and subjected to near field and far field records, while some theoretical improvements are also attained. If interested you can also do some research in this regard. Have a nice day.
PS: As two references, you can see a look at:
1. Soroushian A. A technique for time integration analysis with steps larger than the excitation steps. International Journal for Numerical Methods in Biomedical Engineering. 2008 Dec 1;24(12):2087-111. (This is the first paper)
2. Soroushian, A., Farshadmanesh, P. and Azad, S., 2015. On the Essentiality of Techniques to Enlarge Integration Steps in Transient Analysis Against Digitized Excitations. Journal of Seismology and Earthquake Engineering, 17(1), p.43.
For more references you can check my account at research gate (Surely not all authored by me hahah) or the references of the second reference above
Thanks Dibakar for your advice. I understand what you want to say, and I think it doesn't contradict what I am asking for now. I am asking for new research topics in this field not a specific problem to start working on. May be one of them appeals to me and then I will do extensive reading about it.
The gentlemen before me gave good advices, however we already know how to build safer buildings and to prevent deaths, now it's time to focus on the ways to reduce overall risk and reduce dollars and downtime losses
In my opinion the real deal here are probabilistic seismic risk analyses for critical infrastructure. Seismic PRAs exist for many years for nuclear power plants and they are slowly progressing into large dams, bridges, petrochemical plants etc. However there are many other critical infrastructures prone to earthquake damage in the IT, financial, commercial, public health etc. These infrastructures house a great number of very expensive equipment which is usually sensitive to vibrations and need adequate fragility and vulnerability assessment.