Due to Germany being a low seismic area, earthquake load cases seem to be more or less irrelevant. However, this irrelevance does not apply for many of our international infrastructure projects. The additional effort in terms of technical problems, time and money caused by an earthquake should not be underestimated. A dynamic earthquake load primarily requires the transfer of additional horizontal loads. For decades Woelfel has been an expert for strength related problems concerning the load case earthquake. Since then our engineers have been working on customer-specific solutions intensely, offering qualified and reliable service and support:

• Advisory service for determining the input data, for the adaptation of the construction as well as the development of the analysis concept; representation in front of inspectors and authorities.
• Experience and know-how including national and international earthquake standards such as DIN 4149 (German standard), EUROCODE 8 (European standard) and UBC, IBC, IEEE, IEC etc. (international standards). 
• Designing of structures with quasi-static equivalent methods or dynamic procedures such as floor response spectra, linear or non-linear time-history analyses. 
• Regarding the soil-structure interaction by means of special simulation programs.
• Designing plants: experience with international projects amongst other for nuclear plants, chemical plants, switch gears, vessels and piping systems.  
• Seismic qualification of components by means of shaking tests. 
• Seismic reevaluation of plants and components.
• Optimization of calculation models by means of measuring modal parameters and the response of forced vibrations. 
• Expert opinion of damages caused by earthquakes along with a classification of the damage symptoms, assessment of retrofit and backfitting measures.