Past earthquakes showed that structures composed of reinforced concrete frames infilled with masonry walls are often not able to meet adequate safety margins during increased seismic activities. Only in 2023, two high-magnitude earthquakes (Turkey-Syria and Marrakesh-Safi) devastated the two countries with large stock of masonry structures, also including residential buildings killing more than sixty thousands of people and causing massive damage to the households and infrastructure, with the repair costs still being estimated. The current global challenges to reduce CO2 emissions, which of large part comes from construction industry, require development of new construction materials, which are not only robust and effective but can also mitigate this impact. As known, big part of the current C02 emissions comes from the construction sector and recent reports estimate that buildings are responsible for as much as 35% of the energy consumption and 38% of the CO2 emissions globally.
The main objective of THORAX was to develop the next generation of advanced composite materials for retrofitting of substandard structures such as masonry infilled reinforced concrete buildings – structures, which have shown to have not adequate margins of safety, especially during seismic actions. The new composite material aimed to combine sustainable textile reinforced mortars (TRM) and standard expanded polystyrene (EPS) insulation, thus offering a retrofitting system, which can tackle the structural problems, and, at the same time, deal with energy deficiencies of such buildings.
