Ricerc@Sapienza

Non-structural components are typically not designed for seismic loads, nevertheless their response can significantly affect the building functionality after earthquakes, even for low-intensity events. The poor performance of non-structural elements can result in substantial economic losses and business interruption. Consequently, damage of these components has severe impact in the post-earthquake building recovery in addition to the potential risk to life safety.

The current seismic design inherently accepts high post-earthquake damages to both structural and non-structural components and very high post-earthquake economic losses are expected. Therefore, in the last decades research moved towards a damage-control concept to develop innovative systems for building elements with high seismic performance and low post-earthquake damage, thus resulting into reduced repair costs and business interruption.

Targeting life-safety is arguably not enough for our modern society and communities. The performance-based design objectives need a paradigm shift towards a low-damage design philosophy with the final goal of developing a cost-affordable high-performance building system, including structural and non-structural elements, services and soil foundation systems, capable of sustaining a design level earthquake with limited damage, controllable socio-economic losses and minimum disruption of business.

Innovative damage-mitigation technologies have been recently developed to improve the seismic performance of structural and non-structural elements. The combination of these solutions can lead to a high-performance and cost-efficient building system, capable of sustaining earthquakes with limited damage and reduced socio-economic losses.