Abstract

The seismic risk of the buildings of Barcelona, Spain, is analyzed by using a method based on the capacity spectrum. The seismic hazard in the area of the city is described by means of the reduced 5% damped elastic response spectrum. Obtaining fragility curves for the most important building types of an urban center requires an important amount of information about the structures and the use of nonlinear structural analysis tools. The information on the buildings of Barcelona was obtainedby collecting, arranging, improving, and completing the database of the housing and current buildings. The buildings existing in Barcelona are mainly of two types: unreinforced masonry structures and reinforced concrete buildings with waffled slab floors. In addition, the Arc-View software was used to create a GIS tool for managing the collected information to develop seismic risk scenarios. This study shows that the vulnerability of the buildings is significant and therefore, in spite of the medium to low seismic hazard in the area of the city, the expected seismic risk is considerable.

Abstract

In this paper, performance of dissipative reduced-section diagonals implemented in Automated Rack Supported Warehouses (ARSWs) is analysed. ARSWs are storage systems where the steel racks traditionally used to store goods only, constitute also the primary system of the building. Given the lack of a reference design code to design these structures as seismicresistant, and starting from a critical analysis of the current design approaches, a proper design strategy for these structures has been developed, which is based on the possibility to dissipate seismic energy in the bracings. However, the design of an over-resistant connection that would allow the yielding of the bracings is quite tricky due to the very low thickness of the elements usually adopted for these structures and is only possible by reducing the cross section of the profile. A wide experimental campaign is preformed to validate the behaviour of these diagonals, to be later implemented in the global numerical model of the structure to measure the effective performances of the case study ARSWs, both at local and global level.

Abstract