Repair Costs Due to Infills for Rc Buildings After 2009 L’aquila Earthquake

Abstract

Among natural hazards, earthquakes are certainly paramount due to the lack of possibility to predict their occurrence, and due to their impact on civil structures in terms of social consequences, direct monetary losses, loss in functionality, and risk of casualties. The analysis of damage data in literature highlights the key role played by damage to non-structural components, namely, infills and partitions, in Reinforced Concrete (RC) Moment Resisting Frames (MRF). Therefore, the use of simplified methods leading to the definition of repair costs, fatalties, and repair time due to earthquake, reproducing the influence of infills on the global behaviour of RC frames, is very attractive for insurance and risk management strategies. Among them, recent proposals allow determining damage and losses to individual structural and non-structural components by using fragility and consequence functions. In present work, a simplified mechanical method-PushOver on Shear Type models (POST)for seismic vulnerability assessment of infilled RC buildings is used to determine repair costs of a dataset of lightly damaged residential buildings subjected to the April 6th, 2009 L'Aquila earthquake. To this end, the inter-story drift ratio (IDR) capacity at given damage states (DSs) and the cost functions reported in the most recent literature for infill panels are used to determine repair costs, starting from the nonlinear response history analyses of buildings evaluated according to POST methodology. The considered database is constituted by Moment Resisting Frame (MRF) residential RC buildings located in the Abruzzi region that after the 2009 earthquake have been charged to post-earthquake usability assessment procedure and characterized exclusively by damage to infill panels. In such a way, the evaluation of repair costs can be made by neglecting the contribution due to repair activity to other structural components (namely vertical structures, horizontal structures, stairs, roofs).