Project description
Earthquake-resilient hybrid structures
Earthquake engineering aims at minimising structural damages and preventing the collapse of buildings. However, severe earthquake motions still result in injuries, fatalities, losses due to structural and non-structural damages, and long-term business interruptions. Moreover, earthquakes often induce large residual drifts that may jeopardise both operativity and repairability of structures. There is an urgent need for innovative structures that promote seismic resilience through mitigating earthquake damages, reducing residual drifts, and enabling quick repair. The EU-funded SC-HYBWalls project will develop an innovative structural configuration based on a new self-centring mechanism combined with hybrid steel-concrete structural systems to enable energy dissipation capacity, minimal damage, and residual drifts’ reduction, thus allowing immediate reoccupation after moderate earthquakes and facilitating repair after severe ones.
Objective
Control of both structural and non-structural damage is of utmost importance in Performance-Based Earthquake Engineering. Alleviation of the structural damage and reducing collapse risk under sever ground motions has been a general research focus in earthquake engineering. However, earthquake reconnaissance reports also foreground the significance of injuries, fatalities and economical losses due to failure of non-structural components. Furthermore, the functionality of some critical buildings carrying acceleration-sensitive equipment such as hospitals can be interrupted due to non-structural damage after a seismic event. Therefore, it is vital to urgently meet an inevitable social demand for truly resilient construction. In target resilient buildings, both structural and non-structural damage should be minimized simultaneously in order to mitigate direct and indirect losses such as repair costs and costly downtime during which the building cannot be used or occupied. Different strategies have been implemented by researchers to mitigate the structural and non-structural damage. As an instance, self-centering frames have been developed with the aim of avoiding residual drifts after a seismic event. Meanwhile, hybrid steel-concrete frames consisting of coupled walls with controlled energy dissipation mechanism have recently grabbed a lot of attentions since they take the advantage of both stiffness of RC walls and the ductility and energy dissipation capacity of steel components. The aim of this project is to develop and investigate a novel resilient structural system in which a self-centering mechanism is coupled with hybrid steel-concrete structural systems. Hence, the new system will be capable of resisting moderate to high intensity ground motions while both structural and non-structural damages are kept minimum simultaneously. Employment of this novel earthquake resilient structural system also leads to sustainable, fast and simple construction.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinator
WC1E 6BT London
United Kingdom