Discriminant Analysis of Volatile Organic Compounds data related to a new location method of entrapped people in collapsed buildings of an earthquake

Discriminant Analysis is used as a part of a research, which aims at using expired air analysis for the early location of entrapped people under the ruins of collapsed buildings in an earthquake. This work focuses on the possibility of distinguishing Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) in the entrapment area which originate from different sources. Five categories of samples were analyzed by Thermal Desorption-Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (TD-GC-MS). Expired air samples from healthy humans (Category 1) and fasting people (Category 2) were analyzed for studying the VOCs attributed to entrapped people. Headspace air of urban waste disposal bins (Category 3), headspace air of bags with decaying human bodies (Category 4) and urban air samples (Category 5) were analyzed for studying the VOCs attributed to background sources. Discriminant Rotation, a specific type of Discriminant Analysis was applied on the VOCs concentration matrix of the five categories. Combinations of VOCs that best discriminated each category were determined. Cluster Analysis was used to validate the results of Discriminant Analysis. The advantages and limitations of the method are presented and discussed.     

Informational analysis of seismic sequences by applying the Fisher Information Measure and the Shannon entropy: An application to the 2004–2010 seismicity of Aswan area (Egypt)

The interevent-time (IET) and interevent-distance (IED) series of seismic events occurred at Aswan area (Egypt) from 2004 to 2010 were investigated by means of the Fisher Information Measure and the Shannon entropy. The analysis was performed varying the depth and the magnitude thresholds. The results point out to an increase of level of organization and order with the decrease of magnitude threshold and the increase of depth threshold for the IET series, while the IED series are characterized by a level of uncertainty approximately constant with the threshold magnitude. The complexity measure, calculated as the product of the Fisher Information Measure and the Shannon entropy power, presents very similar pattern for both the types of seismic series, indicating an increasing complexity with the decrease of the threshold magnitude and the increase of the threshold depth.     

Upper bound limit analysis of active earth pressure with different fracture surface and nonlinear yield criterion

Conventional calculations of static and seismic active earth pressures of soils on a retaining wall are formulated assuming the soils obeying a linear Mohr–Coulomb yield criterion. However, experimental evidences show that the strength envelopes of almost all geomaterials are nonlinear in nature over a wide range of normal stresses. In this paper, the strength envelope of the backfill behind a retaining wall is considered to follow a nonlinear yield criterion. A simple method is proposed for calculating the static and seismic active earth pressures acting against a retaining wall using a nonlinear yield criterion. This method is based on the upper bound theorem of limit analysis. Both translational and rotational fracture surfaces are employed in the formulation for calculating active earth pressures. Quasi-static representation of earthquake effects using a seismic coefficient concept is adopted for seismic active earth pressure calculations. Instead of using directly the actual nonlinear yield criterion, a linear Mohr–Coulomb yield criterion, which is tangential to the nonlinear yield criterion, is used to formulate the active earth pressure problem as a classical nonlinear programming problem. A nonlinear sequential quadratic programming algorithm is used to search for the maximum solution. In order to assess the validity of the proposed method, values of active earth pressures for different values of seismic coefficients and nonlinear parameters in the yield criterion are calculated and compared with solutions obtained using an extended Rankine’s active earth pressure theory. For the case of static active earth pressure, the upper bound solutions using the present method with a translational fracture surface are equal to the extended Rankine’s theoretical solutions and are slightly smaller than those obtained using the present method with a rotational fracture surface. For the case of seismic active earth pressure, numerical results obtained using the present method with a rotational fracture surface is very close to the extended Rankine’s theoretical solutions. A study is conducted to investigate the effects of the parameters in the nonlinear yield criterion on the active earth pressures.     

Comparison of the Hurst and DEA exponents between the catalogue and its clusters: The California case

In this work, we analyse the long-run correlations of the seismic catalogue and of its clusters, by means of the Diffusion Entropy Analysis (DEA) and the value of the Hurst exponent. First we calculate the values for the whole catalogue, for the rate and the inter-event times and distance distribution over time, and subsequently we calculate the values for the declustered catalogue and the main clusters. We find a wide variety of behaviours, which depart from the Poisson statistics.     

Scale-free statistics of time interval between successive earthquakes

The statistical property of the calm times, i.e., time intervals between successive earthquakes with arbitrary values of magnitude, is studied by analyzing the seismic time series data in California and Japan. It is found that the calm times obey the Zipf–Mandelbrot power law, exhibiting a new scale-free nature of the earthquake phenomenon. Dependence of the exponent of the power-law distribution on threshold for magnitude is examined. As threshold increases, the tail of the distribution tends to become longer, showing difficulty in statistically estimating time intervals of earthquakes.     

Aftershocks in coherent-noise models

The decay pattern of aftershocks in the so-called ‘coherent-noise’ models [M.E.J. Newman, K. Sneppen, Phys. Rev. E 54 (1996) 6226] is studied in detail. Analytical and numerical results show that the probability to find a large event at time t after an initial major event decreases as t^−τ for small t, with the exponent τ ranging from 0 to values well above 1. This is in contrast to Sneppen and Newman, who stated that the exponent is about 1, independent of the microscopic details of the simulation. Numerical simulations of an extended model [C. Wilke, T. Martinetz, Phys. Rev. E 56 (1997) 7128] show that the power-law is only a generic feature of the original dynamics and does not necessarily appear in a more general context. Finally, the implications of the results to the modelling of earthquakes are discussed.     

Scaling and critical phenomena in a cellular automaton slider-block model for earthquakes

The dynamics of a general class of two-dimensional cellular automaton slider-block models of earthquake faults is studied as a function of the failure rules that determine slip and the nature of the failure threshold. Scaling properties of clusters of failed sites imply the existence of a mean-field spinodal line in systems with spatially random failure thresholds, whereas spatially uniform failure thresholds produce behavior reminiscent of self-organized critical behavior. This model can describe several classes of faults, ranging from those that only exhibit creep to those that produce large events.     

Landslides, forest fires, and earthquakes: examples of self-organized critical behavior

Per Bak conceived self-organized criticality as an explanation for the behavior of the sandpile model. Subsequently, many cellular automata models were found to exhibit similar behavior. Two examples are the forest-fire and slider-block models. Each of these models can be associated with a serious natural hazard: the sandpile model with landslides, the forest-fire model with actual forest fires, and the slider-block model with earthquakes. We examine the noncumulative frequency–area statistics for each natural hazard, and show that each has a robust power-law (fractal) distribution. We propose an inverse-cascade model as a general explanation for the power-law frequency–area statistics of the three cellular-automata models and their ‘associated’ natural hazards.     

A nonextensive modification of the Gutenberg–Richter law: q-stretched exponential form

We study the cumulative distribution for the magnitude of earthquakes in the context of nonextensive statistical mechanics. A new modification of the Gutenberg–Richter (GR) law is introduced. We use seismic data sets which were recorded in two different regions, Iran and California, to compute the cumulative distribution of the magnitudes. The empirical data are fitted extremely well by our suggested expression for the modified GR law over the whole range of magnitudes.     

Nonextensive analysis of seismic sequences

By using the Tsallis-based nonextensive statistics, the analysis of the magnitude distribution of several seismic catalogues in Italy was performed. The analysis shows similar values for the q-value, in good agreement with those obtained for other seismo-tectonic settings [e.g. Silva et al. (2006) [2] and Vilar et al. (2007) [3]]. In particular, it is shown that the volcano seismicity is characterized by slightly lower values for q. The latter results could provide hints for further investigation in discriminating tectonic from volcanic seismicity.