Several coastal communities across Europe and the entire globe are exposed to earthquake triggered tsunami hazard. Past EU projects on the tsunami risk assessment highlighted the significant gaps in existing knowledge in the relatively new tsunami engineering field regarding the fragility of buildings and critical infrastructures to such hazard. The iRESET project enhanced the accuracy of performance assessment methods for engineered structures subjected to tsunami actions by providing an original methodology to perform tsunami structural tests on building sub-assemblages overcoming the scale limitations of existing hydraulic test facilities. Indeed, the reduced capacity of hydraulic test facilities does not allow for a reliable assessment of the global and local (element-level) structure response, nor to produce data for the validation of numerical structural models. The absence of large-scale experimental data and of feasible experimental techniques for understanding the physical behaviour of buildings impacted by tsunami flows represents an important gap in the development of reliable numerical models for the fragility assessment of structures for tsunami hazard, and a critical deficiency of international codes provisions for the design of buildings under tsunami loading.
The objectives of the project mainly consist in: (i) developing a new experimental tsunami structural testing methodology; (ii) perform tsunami structural testing on full scale sub assemblages; and (iii) develop a tool for structural analysis of structures subject to tsunami validated over experimental results and refined numerical models.
The results of the project contribute to an improved capacity for the assessment and management of tsunami risk for buildings and critical infrastructure. This is in line with the EU policy priorities focusing on creating a resilient and stable society against disasters toward a successful implementation of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction. Furthermore, the proposed new testing methodology is highly transversal and could be adopted for other natural hazards such as floods, slow landslides and storm surges, representing a unique experimental resource for the EU.
