Seminários em Engenharia de Estruturas

Título: Assessment of Existing Structures and New Retrofitting Techniques

Palestrante: Prof. Eng. Felice Carlo Ponzo (University of Basilicata – Potenza – Italy)

Abstract:
All over the World, the built heritage is rapidly aging and therefore is strongly increasing the demand of new techniques and procedures for both the assessment and retrofitting of existing structures. Structural assessment and structural health monitoring aim to improve knowledge of the safety and maintainability of civil structures and infrastructures. In order to mitigate urban risk, structural monitoring is a task of major importance, both to ensure the structural integrity of existing structures and to obtain an insight into their responses in normal working conditions and in case of exceptional events, such as earthquake or landslide. Moreover, new techniques based on the structural dynamic identification represent a powerful tools to calibrate numerical models taking into account both structural/non-structural elements interaction and soil/structure interaction effects. Along with the evolution of assessment techniques, in the last years, several experimental activities have been also carried out in order to test the effectiveness of several innovative retrofitting techniques, such as: (i) seismic isolation, (ii) energy dissipating bracing systems, (iii) Active Confinement of Manufactured materials (CAM) and (iv) Dis-CAM system and so on.
Aims of this lecture is to present an overview on the recent advances and their practical applications in the field of the structural assessment and retrofitting arising from both numerical simulations and experimental investigations performed by the University of Basilicata within several research projects.