Natale, Andrea EFFECTIVENESS AND ECONOMIC FEASIBILITY OF BASE ISOLATED SEISMIC RETROFIT SOLUTIONS FOR BUILDINGS AND INFRASTRUCTURES. [Tesi di dottorato]

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Abstract

Most of the existing reinforced concrete (RC) buildings in the Mediterranean area are designed with obsolete code prescriptions far from the modern ones. This made these constructions often inadequate to meet essential structural requirements, especially when subjected to earthquake loads. In recent years, devastating earthquakes demonstrated the high vulnerability of the existing building stock with number of fatalities and significant direct and indirect losses. This remarked the importance of research studies aiming at the development of novel technologies and design strategies to mitigate the seismic risk of existing buildings. Nowadays, various retrofit techniques are available on the market, and they have been extensively used in the repair and retrofitting of existing building in the recent reconstruction processes. This pointed out to researcher and practitioners the advantages and disadvantages of each technique. Actually, the selection of retrofit technique is often related to the confidence of the designer with design principles of a technique respect to another one. Thus, efficient but expensive techniques, such as the base isolation, might be difficult to promote to stakeholders until a simple strategy to quantify and communicate the benefits related to reduction of damage is used. This research work aims at proving useful data to assess the economic convenience of base isolation as seismic retrofit solution. Comprehensive methodology available in literature based on the refined FEMA P-58 loss-assessment framework properly adapted to the characteristics of RC buildings in the Mediterranean area is used. This framework can be used to assess the Pay-back Time (PBT) of different retrofit solutions and to have useful insights for the selection of the most convenient one. Although, the seismic performance of buildings is of paramount importance in the development of modern resilient communities, recent earthquakes also demonstrated that the seismic performance of road infrastructures are critical to guarantee a rapid recover and to reduce direct and indirect economic losses. This thesis also deals with the development of innovative base isolation devices and the related qualification and acceptance process according to standards and national regulations.

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