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Abstract In this article, the fragility of reinforced concrete and steel structures in Bucharest, a city of high seismic hazard, designed using the recent building codes in Romania, is assessed. A total of 24 reinforced concrete and steel structures with heights varying from five stories to 13 stories were analyzed. Their seismic fragility was evaluated using two procedures from the literature. In the first procedure (SPO2FRAG), the fragility was derived based on the pushover curves using the SPO2IDA algorithm, while in the second procedure (FRACAS), the fragility was derived from nonlinear time-history analyses. The analyzed structures were designed for three levels of peak ground accelerations, corresponding to mean return periods of 100, 225, and 475 years. Subsequently, the damage assessment of the analyzed structures was performed using ground motions generated from a Monte-Carlo simulated earthquake catalogue for the Vrancea intermediate-depth seismic source. The damage degrees that were estimated using the SPO2FRAG approach are higher than those estimated using the FRACAS approach. The life-cycle analysis of the structures shows that a further increase of the design peak ground acceleration for Bucharest is feasible from an economic point of view using the SPO2FRAG results. However, based on the FRACAS results, the opposite conclusion can be drawn. Finally, generic lognormal fragility functions are proposed as a function of building height and structural system.

We consider core-shell nanowires with conductive shell and insulating core and with polygonal cross section. We investigate the implications of this geometry on Majorana states expected in the presence of proximity-induced superconductivity and an external magnetic field. A typical prismatic nanowire has a hexagonal profile, but square and triangular shapes can also be obtained. The low-energy states are localized at the corners of the cross section, i.e., along the prism edges, and are separated by a gap from higher energy states localized on the sides. The corner localization depends on the details of the shell geometry, i.e., thickness, diameter, and sharpness of the corners. We study systematically the low-energy spectrum of prismatic shells using numerical methods and derive the topological phase diagram as a function of magnetic field and chemical potential for triangular, square, and hexagonal geometries. A strong corner localization enhances the stability of Majorana modes to various perturbations, including the orbital effect of the magnetic field, whereas a weaker localization favorizes orbital effects and reduces the critical magnetic field. The prismatic geometry allows the Majorana zero-energy modes to be accompanied by low-energy states, which we call pseudo Majorana, and which converge to real Majoranas in the limit of small shell thickness. We include the Rashba spin-orbit coupling in a phenomenological manner, assuming a radial electric field across the shell. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]