Seismic Retrofitting and Health Monitoring of School Buildings of Cyprus

Abstract

This is the published version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Abstract: The vulnerability of existing buildings to seismic forces and their retrofitting is an international problem. The majority of structures in seismic-prone areas worldwide are structures that have been designed either without the consideration of seismic forces, or with previous codes of practice specifying lower levels of seismic forces. In Cyprus, after the three earthquakes that occurred in 1995, 1996, and 1999, the Cyprus State, acting in a pioneering way internationally, has decided the seismic retrofitting of all school buildings, taking into account the sensitivity of the society towards these structures, which house the future generation of the society. In this paper the overall assessment methodology is presented, along with details of the over 10 year ongoing retrofitting program of the school buildings of Cyprus, with emphasis on the description of the program and the development of a wireless monitoring system. In addition, mathematical models of selected school buildings are presented and comparison is made with in-situ measurement. Permanent repository link

Nonlinear Dynamic Analysis of Masonry Buildings and Definition of Seismic Damage States

“…The strengthened building was also instrumented and its natural periods identified. As reported in detail in [26], the first two periods of the building were found to be 0.26s and 0.23s, i.e. very close to each other; they were also very close to those predicted by an elastic analysis assuming firm ground conditions.…”

“…68% of school buildings in Cyprus are made of reinforced concrete, 22% have a dual system consisting of reinforced concrete and masonry, and 10% are made of unreinforced masonry; the majority of the latter are singlestorey with load-bearing stone walls and timber pitched roof [26].…”

“…6). Given the aforementioned uncertainty in masonry strength and also in the ground conditions (both type B and D according to Eurocode 8 were assumed in the analyses) different analyses were run with different material and soil properties [26]. The building strengthened with the chainage was modelled by adding additional reinforced concrete elements (with cross-section 0.45×0.2 m) at the top of the perimeter, which were connected to the adjacent spandrels through rigid arms.…”

Vulnerability assessment and feasibility analysis of seismic strengthening of school buildings

“…The rest were designed after the enforcement of the seismic codes and were found to not require any intervention. To date, about 90% of the school buildings of Cyprus are deemed to possess adequate seismic resistance (Chrysostomou et al 2013).…”

“…In the first part representative school buildings are analysed in both their pristine condition and after applying retrofitting schemes typical of those implemented in the aforementioned large-scale strengthening programme. The selection or the representative buildings is described in Chrysostomou et al (2013) along with a detailed description of their characteristics. Non-linear analysis is conducted on calibrated analytical models of the selected buildings and fragility curves are derived for typical reinforced concrete (R/C) and unreinforced masonry (URM) structures.…”