Improvement and updating of the SP-BELA method for the vulnerability assessment of masonry and RC buildings

Abstract

Italy is a country with medium to high seismicity, densely populated and with an architectural heritage highly vulnerable but also very important from a cultural point of view. This fragility was manifested in the recent earthquakes that hit the peninsula. The evaluation of the structures vulnerability is therefore of fundamental importance to plan the seismic risk mitigation interventions that the Government is putting in place. Several research groups are dealing with this issue, including Eucentre (European Centre for Training and Research in Earthquake Engineering), a centre of excellence of the Italian Civil Protection Department (ICPD). Already in 2008 Eucentre researchers had developed SP-BELA, a simplified analytical method for masonry and RC buildings vulnerability assessment at large-scale. Over the years, this method has been improved to represent the behaviour of the structures in an increasingly realistic manner. This has been possible mostly due to the large amount of observed damage data made available by the ICPD. These data, collected in the online platform Da.D.O. (Database of Observed Damage) owned by the ICPD and developed by Eucentre, allowed calibrating the mechanical vulnerability models on the real damages. This paper describes the new calibration of SP-BELA, which also accounts for the effect of infill panels on the building vulnerability, and provides the parameters describing fragility curves obtained from capacity curves that represent the behaviour of typical Italian building taxonomies. Finally, the human and economic losses risk maps, resulting from the application of the method, are also shown and compared with the published maps.