Introduction

When an active bedrock fault ruptures, the movement along the fault propagates through the overlying soil and produces zones of intense shear. If the fault movement propagates upto or near the ground surface, the damage to constructed facilities due to faulting, in conjunction with that induced by strong ground motion, can be significant. Research in this area contributes to the understanding of the response of soil deposits to the underlying bedrock fault displacement. Currently, numerical simulations of fault motion \& wave propogation in 2D and 3D are being done. Since computation time in modeling soil media is very high, parallel processing techniques are being used to optimize the time. Also, the data mining principles are being used to understand huge data sets of the response of soil media. The outcome of this area is proper understanding of response of the soil media with all its hetrogenieties.

Some ongoing projects in this area are:

2D Numerical modeling of dip-slip faults

3D Numerical modeling of strike-slip faults

Wave propogation in unbounded media

Site amplification studies