ABSTRACT This study proposes a seismic resilience of concrete‐faced rockfill dams (CFRDs) under sequential earthquakes. The numerical model of CFRD was established through LS‐Dyna for dynamic time history simulations with nonlinear soil properties. The mainshock‐aftershock (MSAS) sequences were selected from the NGA‐West2 and PEER earthquake ground motion databases. Traditional earthquake fragility assessment of CFRDs faces challenges due to high computational cost and the dependence among input parameters is not well captured. To overcome these challenges, this research uses vine copulas for multi‐dimensional probabilistic modelling. The vine copula offers an efficient and flexible modelling approach for complex nonlinear dependencies. The seismic response data of CRFD were fitted using the vine‐copula model, and the suitability of different copula models for developing fragility surfaces was evaluated using criteria such as the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC). Furthermore, seismic resilience evaluations were carried out by considering various functionality loss scenarios. In the seismic recovery process, three frequently used recovery functions, such as exponential, trigonometric, and linear, were utilized. The findings indicate that aftershocks have a substantial impact on the seismic resilience of the CFRD, often overlooked in traditional studies. This study offers important insights for CFRD safety evaluations by quantifying the combined effect of MSAS on the fragility and resilience of CFRD.
Khalid et al. (Wed,) studied this question.