SECED 2015 was a two-day conference on Earthquake and Civil Engineering Dynamics that took place on 9-10th July 2015 at Homerton College, Cambridge.
This was the first major conference to be held in the UK on this topic since SECED hosted the 2002 European Conference on Earthquake Engineering in London.
The conference brought together experts from a broad range of disciplines, including structural engineering, nuclear engineering, seismology, geology, geotechnical engineering, urban development, social sciences, business and insurance; all focused on risk, mitigation and recovery.
SECED 2015 featured the following keynote speakers (affiliations correct at the time of the conference):
SECED allows the self-archiving of the Author Accepted Manuscripts (AAM) from the SECED 2015 Conference. This means that all authors can make their conference paper available via a green open access route. The full text of your paper may become visible within your personal website, your institutional repository, a subject repository or a scholarly collaboration network signed up to the voluntary STM sharing principles. It may also be shared with interested individuals, for teaching and training purposes at your own institution and for grant applications (please refer to the terms of your own institution to ensure full compliance).
To deposit your AAM, please adhere to the following conditions:
SECED allows authors to deposit their AAM under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial International Licence 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0). The deposit must clearly state that the AAM is deposited under this licence and that any reuse is allowed in accordance with the terms outlined by the licence. To reuse the AAM for commercial purposes, permission must be sought by contacting seced@ice.org.uk. For the sake of clarity, commercial usage would be considered as, but not limited to:
Should you have any questions about our licensing policies, please contact seced@ice.org.uk.

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This paper explores the possibility of applying the principles of capacity design to the seismic protection of embedded retaining structures. The study hinges on the analysis of the plastic mechanisms that may be activated by cantilevered and anchored retaining walls during strong motion while preserving the integrity of the structural members. Through a combination of numerical analyses and simple limit equilibrium calculations, it is shown that that for the wall schemes considered in this work it is possible to derive the maximum internal forces that the structural members may undergo during a severe earthquake from the analysis of the relevant plastic mechanism. It is also shown that these internal forces do not depend on the amplitudes of seismic motion, but are related only to the strength of the dissipating elements of the system. For anchored walls, this approach indicates that the optimal way to limit the internal forces in the retaining wall is to design weak anchors that during the seismic event may mobilise the strength at the contact of the soil with their injected active portion.