engleski

Seismic Strengthening of Masonry Structures

A great amount of buildings in Croatia are masonry structures. Most of them were built before the development of seismic codes and a lot of them are vernacular, unreinforced structures. Clay brick structures were mainly built in continental part of a country, while in the costal parts stone masonry was used, both traditionally combined with timber floor systems. As a result, many of them need to be evaluated and, if needed, strengthened. At the moment just a few standards and codes exist for evaluation and retrofitting of existing structures so the future development in seismic research is greatly pointing in this direction. Some guidelines do exist but are not very comprehensive and require a lot of engineering judgement to implement. An overview of current building stock in Croatia, as well as the most commonly used methods of strengthening with pros and cons are presented in this paper. The problem lies in the complexity of implementing retrofitting methods since most of the masonry buildings are in use (private or public) during the strengthening. Besides that, a great number of buildings in Croatia (i.e. City of Dubrovnik) and around the world built in masonry have a great heritage value so the requirements made by conservators play a part in the methods used as well. The main objective of this paper is to comprehend, gather and compare different state-of-the-art principles of the evaluation and seismic retrofitting of structures. Emphasis is put on the Croatian building stock and developing a comprehensive set of guidelines for simple and cost-effective practical application. Different approaches are analyzed and compared in order to get closer to a unified method of evaluation and strengthening of existing structures.

existing structures, masonry, seismic capacity, strengthening methods, retrofitting methods

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