What is Earthquake performance simulation?
{{main|Earthquake engineering}} [[File:Snapshot of earthquake-like crash testing.jpg|thumb|Physical [[simulation]] of [[Seismic performance|earthquake performance]] of two [[building model]]s.]]'''Earthquake performance simulation''' is meant to study effect of earthquakes on building structures and is a practical way of seeing a thing to happen without it actually taking place in the same way. == Physical earthquake performance simulation == [[File:EPET 3-D animation PrintScreen.jpg|thumb|left|Print-screen of a computational earthquake performance simulation.]] The best way to do it is to put the structure on a [[shake-table]] that simulates the [[seismic load]]s and watch what may happen next (if you have no time to stand out in the field and wait for a real earthquake to strike, of course). The earliest experiments like this were performed more than a century ago.<ref name=SeismicExperiments>{{cite book|title= Seismic Experiments on the Fracturing and Overturning of Columns|author=Omori, F.|date=1900|publisher=Publ. Earthquake Invest. Comm. In Foreign Languages, N.4, Tokyo}}</ref> == Computational earthquake performance simulation == Another way is to evaluate the [[seismic performance|earthquake performance]] analytically. The very first earthquake simulations were performed by statically applying some ''horizontal inertia forces'', based on scaled peak ground [[acceleration]]s, to a [[mathematical model]] of a building.<ref name=SeismicDesignOfBuildingStructures>{{cite book|title= Seismic Design of Building Structures|url= https://archive.org/details/seismicdesignofb0008lind|author=Lindeburg, Michael R.; Baradar, Majid|date=2001|publisher=Professional Publications|isbn=1888577525}}</ref> With the further development of computational technologies, statics approaches began to give way to dynamics ones.<ref name=DynamicsofStructures>{{cite book|title= Dynamics of Structures|url= https://archive.org/details/dynamicsofstruct0000clou|author=Clough, Ray W.; Penzien, Joseph|date=1993|publisher=McGraw-Hill|isbn=0