Verification Through Shaking Table Testing of EC8-Based Assessment Approaches Applied to a Building Designed for Gravity-Loads

Abstract

Recent events in Italy and in other countries with similar building stock have demonstrated the need of an extensive campaign of assessment to define the seismic risk and outline the intervention policy especially for buildings devoted to public or important functions (hospitals, fire brigade buildings, schools, etc.) and for the infrastructures. Advanced codes of practice, like EC8, or those implementing similar concepts, have introduced in the last years accurate verification procedures based on the mixed use of numerical and experimental investigations, to qualify the level of knowledge of the existing structures first, and to verify the compliance with limit state requirements for seismic loads, second. Since the introduction of the assessment approaches in the codes several applications to real cases have been developed. However, the number of studies carried out to verify their real efficiency is still limited. This would require a more extended campaign of analyses to better validate procedures and safety requirement assumptions. The work presented in this paper aims at contributing to the experimental verification of code assessment approaches in the common case of an irregular multi-storey RC building designed for gravity loads. As required in the assessment procedures, linear and non linear analyses have been applied to determine the performance level of the building at each limit state. Then a dynamic testing campaign has been performed on the advanced testing facility at EUCENTRE in Italy, to directly verify the effects of seismic loading. An innovative system of high definition digital cameras developed at EUCENTRE has allowed the acquisition of a rich base of data in the shaking table tests and a careful comparison of the results in terms of local and global response parameters to those obtained from the code procedures.