Abstract
In Europe, most of the social housing heritage, built before the 1980s, suffers of architectural and functional obsolescence and seismic vulnerability, raising questions about the future of the cities and their inhabitants. In an era of environmental emergency and lack of resources demolition and reconstruction is not a sustainable alternative. A multi-purpose campaign of architectural, functional and structural retrofit is fundamental but the complex information and requirements to handle require integrated and innovative solutions. The bio-mimicry design approach led to the definition of the “building exoskeleton”: an external steel frame, two or three-dimensional, encapsulating the existing building and provided of shape memory alloys-based devices for passive seismic dissipation. The simplicity of the structure gives high flexibility in the definition of the new architectural features and functional performances, adapting to the changing necessities on both space and time scales. The energy performances result also radically improved. The efficiency of this scheme to improve the seismic response of the constructions is verified for a real case study – a concrete frame with brick infill – through static and dynamic nonlinear analyses with the software SAP2000. Finally, the economic and technical feasibility of the proposal is discussed together with the implications of the project and the possible developments.
Highlights
A consistent percentage of masonry and reinforced concrete buildings, old or recently built, cannot provide appropriate levels of seismic safety, because of the poor quality of the construction even before that degradation and aging of materials run their course [1]
This is one reason for the designers to propend for integrated approaches, a single intervention that solves a complex set of problems: the seismic retrofitting should be realized together with renovations and refurbishments and this synergy should improve the overall characteristics of the building at the same time reducing the ancillary construction expenses
This paper presents a specific integrate approach for retrofit of social housing buildings based on the definition of an “adaptive exoskeleton”, connected to the existing structure with shape memory alloys-based dampers (SMADs)
Summary
A consistent percentage of masonry and reinforced concrete buildings, old or recently built, cannot provide appropriate levels of seismic safety, because of the poor quality of the construction even before that degradation and aging of materials run their course [1]. It is rare to find the “best” intervention on a general level [13], but typically the ratio between the costs and the performances achieved is determinant for the definition of the retrofit program This is one reason for the designers to propend for integrated approaches, a single intervention that solves a complex set of problems (architectural, functional, structural): the seismic retrofitting should be realized together with renovations and refurbishments and this synergy should improve the overall characteristics of the building at the same time reducing the ancillary construction expenses. In this way, the high costs associated with seismic retrofitting could be substantially reduced. The scheme will be validated in relationship to the need of new energy performances
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