Once the methodology has been established and implemented, we will apply it to a medium-size basin to verify the formulation and to gain additional insight into the effects of the inelastic soil behavior on the seismic ground motion of sedimentary basins. We need to set up a prototype basin model by rendering its geometry into a finite element mesh, while characterizing the local soil properties, which influences mesh density. One important issue is to link the elastic material properties with the parameters of soil plasticity. The correlation between the plastic characteristics of soil media and the irreversible plastic process during an earthquake will be studied by visualizing and analyzing the simulation results.
The actual earthquake simulation with material plasticity on parallel computers will definitely pose a variety of numerical problems regarding equilibrium, stability and efficiency. The resolution of some of these issues can be expected to be a tedious task. We need to tackle them by considering their theoretical and implementation aspects, especially those inherent in plasticity modelling, nonlinear analysis and parallel processing.