Seismic performance of structures incorporating seismic isolation with lead-rubber bearings

The emergence of new high-performance materials and equipment, as well as advancements in numerical calculation techniques, have allowed base isolation to take its place among the strategies used by engineers in earthquake resistant design. Despite the enormous advantages of implementing seismic isolation, its applications have so far been limited to critical infrastructures (hospitals, re stations, etc.) located in earthquake-prone areas. The relatively high costs associated with the installation of an isolation system constitute a major constraint when choosing the structural system of a building. In this Master's project, a 4 storey composite-steel administrative building located in Sion (Switzerland) is designed, according to several importance classes, in order to study the relevance of the installation of a base isolation system. Two dierent design methodologies are adopted to determine the dimensions of the foundations and the main load-bearing elements of two buildings, one with a xed-base and the second with a seismic isolation system. The results of the various design procedures clearly indicate that the choice of installing isolating supports is not obvious. Indeed, when the building under study is considered as a critical infrastructure, signicant savings, up to more than 20% in terms of building materials, can be achieved for an isolated structure. On the other hand, for an ordinary structure, the additional costs associated with the installation of isolated supports cannot be oset by savings in construction materials. These results reinforce the perspective that, in the presence of an ordinary building, the traditional xed-base solution remains the most ecient. However, despite its relatively high cost, a base isolated building performs better during a seismic event, with structural demands and damages signicantly mitigated compared to a xed-base building. To compare the responses of the two structural systems, two non-linear models are created on OpenSEES. Two dynamic analyses are then conducted for two groups of 40 seismic records, calibrated according to two characteristic intensities. Based on the results obtained, it is clear that the xed building undergoes higher demands (in deformations and accelerations in particular) than its isolated counterpart. These demands are then used and transformed into a decision variable (in this case, repair costs) through loss analyses conducted on the EarL software. These analyses show that after the occurrence of an earthquake, the repair costs of a conventional building can reach 25 % of the initial construction costs, almost 10 times the value obtained in the case of a base isolated building. This Master's project demonstrates that despite the high initial cost of base isolation technologies, their implementation can not only be amortized through possible material savings, but also, through the reduction of repair costs due to a better performance of the building over its lifecycle.

Reuse in Architecture & Structural Design

Jan Friedrich Georg Brütting

Introduction The construction industry has an extensive impact on the global environment and will be facing three big challenges in the next decades: reducing its resource consumption, decreasing its energy use, and limiting its waste production. This is even more crucial, considering global population growth and increasing urbanization. Consequently, a shift of paradigm from a linear economy of make-use-dispose, towards a circular economy that advocates closed loops within the service life of materials and components is required. Recycling currently is the common strategy to make use of obsolete materials; however, it involves energy for reprocessing (e.g. melting steel scrap). Instead, direct reuse of components close to their original form has the potential to reduce environmental impacts further because sourcing additional raw material is avoided and only few energy is spent for transformation [1]. In the case of buildings and infrastructures, load-bearing systems contribute the most to the embodied environmental impacts. This is because of their big mass and energy intensive construction process. These observations suggest that reusing structural elements has large potential to reduce the environmental footprint of building structures. Reused components may consequently have a longer service life than the systems to which they initially belonged and disassembled buildings become a mine for new constructions. This idea is of course not a today’s invention, but has found application already far in the past as well as in recent building projects. Before industrialization, most building materials were sourced locally and reuse of building materials and components was the rule because it was more cost and time efficient than new production [1]. The scarcity of building materials had to be considered in design and construction. A classic example is the reuse of bricks throughout the Roman and Greek eras or in post-war times. Remarkable are also the stone columns of the Great Mosque of Cordoba, Spain, which were reused from nearby Roman and Visigoth ruins to support Moorish double arches (Fig. 1a). More recently, the steel structure of the BedZED project in London (Fig. 1b) was constructed from 90 % locally reclaimed elements [2]. Many other contemporary case studies in which bricks, timber, or steel elements have been reused are reported in [1] and [2]. An outstanding structure is the London Olympic Stadium (Fig. 1c), whose roof truss incorporates 2000 tons of steel pipeline tubes reused from a nearby development project [3]. At smaller scale, a strained grid-shell pavilion made of reclaimed skis has been built by the researchers at EPFL’s Structural Xploration Lab (Fig 1d). Recently this environmental-aware architectural and structural design is evolving. In addition, governments have understood the potential of circular economy and circular design. For instance, the European Commission has issued an EU action plan for the circular economy in order to reduce waste and landfill. Research While historic and contemporary projects, especially in Europe, highlight the environmental, time or cost benefits of building with reclaimed (structural) elements, many technological challenges remain. Buildings have to be carefully disassembled, which is often only possible for steel or wooden structures that are joined with reversible connections, or when elements can be cut and member ends are reshaped to fit new settings. Further, the quality and structural capacity of reclaimed elements has to be ensured. Under these assumptions, this research focuses on the standpoint of composing building structures from a stock of reclaimed elements. This entails reversing the conventional design process. The constrained availability of elements dictates the layout (topology and geometry) of the designed structure due to the a-priori set geometric and mechanical properties. The design shifts towards a “form follows availability” paradigm [1]. Structural optimization methods, which traditionally seek best performing structural systems under given boundary conditions, can be extended to integrate and facilitate element reuse in structural design. This research uses the combination of combinatorial optimization and form-finding methods to design reticulated structures from a given stock of reclaimed elements [4], where: 1) available elements are grouped by material, structural capacity and dimensions, 2) an optimal assignment of a subset of stock elements into a structural system is performed, and 3) the structure geometry is optimized. Generally, the assignment step 2) minimizes the structural weight to optimally utilize the available element capacities, whereas the geometry optimization step 3) is carried out to match truss geometry and available element lengths. This method is applied to optimize truss systems subject to differently composed stocks. In each case, varying cross section sizes or element lengths result in a different outcome of the designs. Figure 2 (a) shows a typical roof truss design, which is loaded at the top chord and is used as the initial topology for the introduced optimization method. The obtained layout for the case of using Stock A is reported in Fig. 1b. This stock consist of elements with 3.00m length which are n = 4 times available for each of the six cross-section groups. The use of the stock is indicated by the superimposed magenta colored bars on top of the grey ones. Due to limitations of the stock to 3.00 m elements only, the truss layout contains two arrays of three almost equilateral triangles. For the truss made from Stock B, which is composed of equivalent cross section groups but with variable element lengths, the found geometry is shallower and vaulted. In both cases, the geometry optimization allows to use most of the stock members with their full length. The exploration of these case studies concludes that the availability of elements has a significant influence on the final structural design as well as its structural performance. For example, if an insufficient amount of elements with small cross-sections is available, the structure will be oversized (i.e. the capacity of available members is not utilized) and environmental savings are diminished. Conclusion The proposed optimization and form finding method renders a first step towards facilitating the design with reused elements where the outcome is not as predictable as in the well-established conventional structural design process. Future research will extend this method towards different structural typologies such as bending and frame systems. Further, the question of customized connection details enabling the joining of stock elements has to be addressed.

2018

Shake-table test on a four-storey structure with reinforced concrete and unreinforced masonry walls

Katrin Beyer, Sarah Petry, Marco Tondelli

With the introduction of higher seismic design forces in the Swiss loading standard of 2003 most unreinforced masonry (URM) buildings failed to satisfy the seismic design check. For this reason, in new construction projects, a number of URM walls are nowadays replaced by reinforced concrete (RC) walls. The lateral bracing system of the resulting structure consists therefore of URM walls and some RC walls which are coupled by RC slabs and masonry spandrels. Within the scope of a FP7-Series project a four-storey RC-URM wall structure is tested on the shake-table at the TREES laboratory of the EUCENTRE in Pavia (Italy). The test is conducted at half-scale and is part of a larger research initiative on mixed RC-URM wall systems initiated at EPFL. The key objective of the test is to gain insights into the dynamic behaviour of RC-URM wall structures and to provide input for the definition of a performance-based design approach of such mixed structural system. This paper presents details on the structural system, the instrumentation and the selected ground motion and discusses preliminary results of the shake-table test.

2013

Seismic Performance Evaluation and Retrofit of Existing School Buildings (CROCS-System) in Switzerland

Martina Paronesso

Existing school buildings in Switzerland that have been designed from the early 1970s typically utilized a modular architectural layout and structural system commonly known as CROCS (Centre de rationalization de d’organisation des constructions scolaires). Such buildings were designed without any seismic design requirements. However, Switzerland is a moderate seismic zone and the seismic safety and lateral stability of such buildings should be carefully examined. There is also a similar concern because of hazards due to induced seismicity. In particular, such buildings could develop a soft story collapse mechanism because capacity design principles were not employed. The aim of this Master thesis is to investigate the non-linear static and dynamic behaviour of a CROCS school located in Switzerland in a moderate seismic zone. Its performance is examined based on nonlinear response-history analysis in the context of Performance-Based Earthquake Engineering. A numerical model is developed using the concentrated plasticity modelling approach to identify its most critical seismic deﬁciencies. Based on the ﬁndings, an optimal seismic retroﬁt strategy is proposed and evaluated.

2017

Reuse in Architecture & Structural Design

Jan Friedrich Georg Brütting

2018