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.

The Role of Soil Structure Interaction in Jeopardising Their Operability
Hits: 4772
The latest advances in port and maritime industry have redefined the role of harbor facilities as a benchmark for the national economy. However, the latter mainly depend on aged quay walls built according to obsolete seismic codes. Provisions regarding the seismic performance of very sensitive components of container terminals such as cranes are rather limited, although several seismic design guidelines exist for port structures. Cranes are quite vulnerable to differential displacement of their supports, yet they are typically designed as rigid frames with little or no seismic detailing neglecting their potential interplay with quay-walls during earthquake shaking. This paper presents a parametric study involving nonlinear FE numerical analyses of the entire soil-wall-crane interacting system. It is shown that although the inertial response of the wall is usually out-of-phase with the crane, the seaward displacement of the former may impose kinematically-induced loading on the crane legs producing distortion or even derailment. In terms of current quay-wall design practice, it is shown that replacing the crane with two constant vertical forces at the locations of its two legs is not always a conservative approach.