In-plane shake-table tests were performed on eight full-scale unreinforced concrete block walls. Three of the walls were left as plain unreinforced masonry and five were strengthened using glass-fiber-reinforced plastic (GFRP) strips in four different configurations. All walls were first subjected to design-level earthquake records to determine the improvement obtained from the addition of the GFRP. The walls were then subjected to extreme-level earthquake records to examine the ultimate failure modes and the effects of the various GFRP configurations on the response of the walls. It was observed that all strengthened specimens performed well during the design-level shaking, and three of the four GFRP configurations also performed well during the extreme-level shaking. The tests showed that the use of vertical GFRP strips alone is able to improve the in-plane performance of URM walls. The strips were also able to control the failure modes, and prevent collapse after severe damage, improving significantly the life safety performance of URM walls.
This paper describes the architecture of a comprehensive seismic monitoring system developed in 2009 by the British Columbia Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure (MoT) and the University of British Columbia, Canada. The main purpose of the British Columbia Smart Infrastructure Monitoring System project is to instrument and monitor key structures to provide confirmation of their seismic capacity, assist in focusing retrofit efforts, detect structural damage, and provide rapid damage assessment of those structures, following a seismic event. The automatic creation of shakemaps following an earthquake provides information for the MoT's non-instrumented bridges. The public notification systems and web pages have been developed to display real-time seismic data both from the strong motion network and seismic structural health monitoring network. Tools and methods have been developed to help transform the current practice of inspecting and evaluating structures to a more rational and effective one that uses the up-to-date sensing technology with fast and efficient techniques.
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