STRUCTURAL RETROFIT AND COMPUTATIONAL ENGINEERING FOR SEISMIC ENGINEERING IN JAPAN

It is needless to say that the computer and/or computational engineering has contributed much to the development of the earthquake engineering such as seismic design of structures in providing good tools to researchers and engineers. However, it has been also pointed out that the proper selection of numerical analysis and/or computer program is very important for engineers in utilizing it in the design of structures, because a numerical analysis method is based upon its own coverage. A rigorous analysis does not always gives a correct solution in a sence of engineering or of structural safety, but, some times, it gives mathematically rigorous but unrealistic solution. Therefore, numerical analysis should be performed with engineering judgement or experiments specially in the field of earthquake engineering because this field has large uncertainties on predicting the effect of earthquake on structures. This paper is based on the presented paper at the Bertero Symposium held in January 31an4 February 1 at Berkeley, California, USA which was entitled "Needs to Evaluate Real Seismic Performance of Buildings-Lessons from 1995 Hyogoken-Nambu Earthquake-". The lessons for buildings from the damage due to the Hyogoken-Nambu Earthquake are necessity to develop more rational seismic design codes based upon a performance-based design concept, and to evaluate seismic performance of existing buildings. In my keynote lecture at the Korean Association for Computational Structural Engineering, the history of seismic design and use of structural analysis in Japan, the lessons for buildings from the Hyogoken-Nambu Earthquake, the building damage due to the earthquake, the reasons why the seismic retrofit has not been implemented much, the responses to the lessons from the earthquake, the Network Committee for promotion of seismic retrofit of buildings, the Law for promotion of seismic retrofit of buildings and the implementation of seismic retrofit in Japan are presented.