Development of kinematic and dynamic rupture models, in an elastic medium, equivalent to a dynamic rupture model with off-fault plastic yielding

Alice-Agnes Gabriel (ETHZ), Dr. Jean-Paul Ampuero (Caltech, USA), Dr. Luis A. Dalguer (ETHZ), Dr. P. Martin Mai, (KAUST, Saudi Arabia)

In this project we plan to develop a set of dynamic rupture models, incorporating off-fault plastic yielding (macroscopic representation of damage) in the bulk, to investigate the effect of the non-elastic response on the dynamic rupture propagation and near source ground motion as well as the physical limits on the slip velocity function and extreme ground motion.

Emphasis is given to examine the slip velocity pulse as a measure of ground-motion excitation, since it is well know that rupture directivity associated with propagating slip pulse can generate large amplitude of near-source velocity ground motion.

In the current stage of the project, we focus our study on the conditions to generate steady-state pulse-like ruptures and how this regime operates when off-fault inelastic deformation is considered during rupture simulation. We target to characterize the conditions to generate steady-state pulse-like ruptures and compare these to analogous results in purely elastic media. This study needs an extensive application of numerical methods and codes for dynamic rupture simulations in the presence of off-fault plasticity.

_{Figure: Velocity snapshot of pulse-like dynamic rupture simulated by the spectral element method (SEM)}