The Seminar on Academician CHEN Houqun’s Research Achievements was held at IWHR in April, to honor the contributions made by the founder of China’s earthquake engineering research of hydraulic structures.

The Seminar on Academician CHEN Houqun’s Research Achievements

Born in 1932 and elected as an Academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, CHEN Houqun has been devoting himself to earthquake engineering research of hydraulic structures for more than 60 years. He has made fundamental contributions in solving key seismic issues of major hydro-projects, including Xinfengjiang, Ertan, Three Gorges, Xiaowan, Xiluodu, and Dagangshan Projects, presided over the drafting and revision of a number of standards, including “Code for Seismic Design of Hydraulic Structures”, and chaired the construction of China’s first large-scale three-way simulation shaking table with six degree of freedom. He also took the lead in China’s water sector to independently develop high-efficiency parallel computing programs based on the Tianhe-1 supercomputer and applied them into the high dam seismic safety research.

Starting from scratch, China’s seismic research and design of hydraulic structures has now reached world-class level thanks to the pioneering work of him and the continuous efforts of numerous researchers.

At the seminar, Academician CHEN Houqun made a comprehensive introduction of his research, including: 1) pseudo-static method for seismic response, seismic response of the vibration system, and seismic response of the wave system for analyzing seismic response of concrete dam systems, 2) method for identification of response spectra of relevant site design based on maximum design earthquake, and 3) dynamic mechanical property test of full-gradation dam concretes and meso-mechanical calculation and analysis for examining dam concretes’ dynamic resistance.

He identifies the focus of China’s research on seismic safety of hydraulic structures as to prevent serious secondary disasters caused by high dams in extreme earthquakes, and the two critical issues as identification of non-point source input that features near-field big earthquakes and establishment of quantitative criterion for systematic overall seismic instability. He advocates that interdisciplinary research should be done among three study areas –ground motion input of dam site, structural and systematic seismic response, and dynamic resistance of concrete materials. He also urges creative study to be done in concept elaboration, approach for checking, analysis method and computing technologies.

Academician CHEN Houqun delivering report

Researchers and experts nationwide attended the seminar in person or online, expressing their high respects and sincere wishes for Academician CHEN Houqun.