SCEC Award Number 14220 View PDF
Proposal Category Individual Proposal (Integration and Theory)
Proposal Title Earthquake Nucleation and Propagation on Rate and State Faults Single and Two State Variables Formulation, and Evolution by Kato-Tullis law
Investigator(s)
Name Organization
Ahmed Elbanna University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Other Participants Xiao Ma, Graduate Student, UIUC
SCEC Priorities 2d, 3c, 3e SCEC Groups FARM, CS, Seismology
Report Due Date 03/15/2015 Date Report Submitted N/A
Project Abstract
 Thanks to the generous support of SCEC (a travel award up to $1000) I was able to attend the annual meeting at Palm Springs between Sunday September 7th and Wednesday September 10th. Participation in the meeting was very helpful at many levels and enabled me to continue my engagement with the community through presenting my own research, exploring other people research, and discussing new research ideas and collaboration avenues.
Intellectual Merit The research I co-presented at the annual meeting represents a new paradigm for modeling sheared fault gouge by constructing physics-based constitutive description linking microscopic physics to macroscopic response and enabling the resolution of phenomena not readily described by classical rate and state laws such as grain breakage, strain localization and acoustic fluidization.
Broader Impacts Attending the meeting was an excellent opportunity to engage more with the SCEC community and to develop new research directions and collaboration avenues. It also motivated implementing new friction laws in the powerful finite element program ABAQUS. The optimized structure of the software and its flexibility in implementing complex geometry and new material models, as well as excellent parallelism will enable exploring new classes of problems in earthquake physics and will bring this research topic closer to the Engineering community.
Exemplary Figure None