Enhancing the resilience of the built environment is an important challenge in Europe. As far as the seismic hazard is concerned, significant results have been achieved in the last decades. Nonetheless, recent seismic events in Italy as well as in other earthquake-prone regions in Europe and worldwide have highlighted that social, economic and environmental consequences in urban areas hit by earthquakes are still very high. In this perspective, the need of taking into proper account the damage mitigation together with the collapse prevention in seismic engineering has motivated the replacement of the force-based methods with more effective approaches, namely displacement- and energy-based approaches. Despite its widespread application, the current displacement-based approach has several significant weaknesses, such as the inability to reflect cumulative damage and some methodological inconsistencies related to its version implemented within existing building codes. An energy-based approach has been thus explored in the past years to cope with the inherent limitations of the displacement-based approach but, even if the existing studies have shown a great potential, there are still many open issues that prevent its large-scale application.
Hence, this project aims at contributing to the development of a new and comprehensive energy-based framework for the analysis and design of structures under earthquakes, with focus on reinforced concrete buildings. Furthermore, the project is committed to produce positive social impacts through the conversion of scientific and technical results into simplified guidelines intended to support the implementation of the energy-based approach in the next generation of building codes.
