Post-Doctoral Fellowships
Italy
Earthquake resilience : towards safer buildings

Maria Teresa
DE RISI
Institution
Polytechnic School of Base Science - Faculty of Engineering
Country
Italy
Nationality
Italian
Helping building safer buildings and improving existing ones
The project’s preliminary missions will indeed consist of a series of experiments. The first sequence will concern the analysis of existing experimental data from laboratory tests of post-earthquake damage, including the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake. The second series consists in new experimental testing of both existing and future types of infills in RC buildings. Once these steps have been completed, the project’s ultimate goals are the proposal of a reliable modelling approach to assess the vulnerability of new and existing RC buildings and the study and proposal of both new construction and retrofitting strategies to limit damage to infills.
« RC buildings are particularly common in earthquake-prone areas. It is thus crucial to provide an as comprehensive as possible knowledge of all the vulnerability aspects of these structures », Dr. Maria Teresa De Risi stresses. « Due to the heterogeneity of infills typology and the large number of modelling issues to deal with, the road to a correct assessment of their performance is still long », she acknowledges. Her project proposes to perform an important step forward towards this objective.