Throughout the world, millions of people are at risk because they live in unreinforced earthen dwellings, which have consistently shown extremely poor structural behaviour during earthquakes. Every single earthquake occurring in these areas has caused unacceptable loss of life, injuries, and property damage. Earthquakes are recurrent and construction damage is cumulative. It is urgent, therefore, to devise low-cost, easy-to-implement seismic reinforcement systems and to make them available to the actual dwellers. A group of researchers at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú has been working towards that goal, especially on improving the seismic capacity of one-storey adobe dwellings. They have proposed construction methodologies for a seismic reinforcement system consisting of a mesh of nylon ropes that confines all earthen walls. This reinforcement system would control the wa...

The seismic vulnerability of single-story adobe dwellings located in Cusco, Peru, is studied based on a mechanics-based procedure, which considers the analysis of in-plane and out-of-plane failure mechanisms of walls. The capacity of each dwelling is expressed as a function of its displacement capacity and period of vibration and is evaluated for different limit states to damage. The seismic demand has been obtained from several displacement response spectral shapes. From the comparison of the capacity with the demand, probabilities of failure have been obtained for different PGA values. The results indicate that fragility curves in terms of PGA are strongly influenced by the response spectrum shape; however, this is not the case for the derivation of fragility curves in terms of limit state spectral displacement. Finally, fragility curves for dwellings located in Pisco, Peru, were compu...

Adobe is one of the oldest construction materials that is still used in many seismic countries, and different construction techniques are found around the world. The adobe material is characterized as a brittle material; it has acceptable compression strength but it has poor performance under tensile and shear loading conditions. Numerical modelling is an alternative approach for studying the nonlinear behaviour of masonry structures such as adobe. The lack of a comprehensive experimental database on the adobe material properties motivated the study developed here. A set of a reference material parameters for the adobe were obtained from a calibration of numerical models based on a quasi-static cyclic in-plane test on full-scale adobe wall representative of the typical Peruvian adobe constructions. The numerical modelling, within the micro and macro modelling approach, lead to a good pre...

In Peru, construction of dwellings using confined masonry walls (CM) has a high percentage of acceptance within many sectors of the population. It is estimated that only in Lima, 80% of the constructions use CM and at least 70% of these are informal constructions. This mean that they are built without proper technical advice and generally have a high seismic vulnerability. One way to reduce this vulnerability is by reinforcing the walls. However, despite the existence of some reinforcement methods in the market, not all of them can be applied massively because there are other parameters to take into account, as economical, criteria for seismic improvement, reinforcement ratio, etc. Therefore, in this paper the feasibility of using five reinforcement techniques has been studied and compared. These reinforcements are: welded mesh (WM), glass fiber reinforced polymer (GFRP), carbon fiber re...

Stone masonry is one of the oldest construction types due to the natural and free availability of stones and the relatively easy construction. Since stone masonry is brittle, it is also very vulnerable and in the case of earthquakes damage, collapses and causalities are very likely to occur, as it has been seen during the last Italian earthquake in Amatrice in 2016. In the recent years, some researchers have performed experimental tests to improve the knowledge of the behaviour of stone masonry. Concurrently, there is the need to reproduce the seismic behaviour of these structures by numerical approaches, also in consideration of the high cost of experimental tests. In this work, an alternative simplified procedure to numerically reproduce the diagonal compression and shear compression tests on a rubble stone masonry is proposed within the finite element method. The proposed procedure re...

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This paper describes the results of a numerical study of a full-scale adobe building model tested on a shaking table. Material properties of adobe masonry were calibrated to represent the wall in-plane seismic behavior, based on a prior numerical analysis of an adobe wall carried out by the authors. The inelastic part of the constitutive model was represented by a softening curve in tension and by a hardening/softening behavior in compression; thus, the fracture energy is a key issue in the modeling process. A finite element model that relies on a homogenous continuum approach was developed in Abaqus/Explicit software. The damage evolution in the numerical simulation represented fairly well the experimental crack pattern, for in-plane and out-of-plane seismic effects. Overall, the calibrated material properties and the explicit solution scheme proved to be appropriate for simulating the ...

House self-construction and self-management are very common in different cities in Peru, which is the case in several areas in the district of San Miguel (Puno). This is due to the lack of financial resources to hire professionals to design and construct their houses. Therefore, many residents build without technical guidance and materials without quality standards. As a result, the buildings in the area have various construction pathologies that demonstrate their high seismic vulnerability, which indicates that the guidelines established in the Peruvian Masonry Design Code NTE 070 are not followed. Therefore, as a first step towards evaluating the seismic vulnerability of the houses in San Miguel, it was decided to evaluate the construction pathologies and typologies by conducting a survey. Subsequently, to characterize and evaluate the physical-mechanical properties of the masonry wall...

This paper presents a state-of-the-art review of the nonlinear modelling techniques available today for describing the structural behaviour of masonry infills and their interaction with frame structures subjected to in-plane loads. Following brief overviews on the behaviour of masonry-infilled frames and on the results of salient experimental tests, three modelling approaches are discussed in more detail: the micro, the meso and the macro approaches. The first model considers each of the infilled frame elements as separate: brick units, mortar, concrete and steel reinforcement; while the second approach treats the masonry infill as a continuum. The paper focuses on the third approach, which combines frame elements for the beams and columns with one or more equivalent struts for the infill panel. Due to its relative simplicity and computational speed, the macro model technique is more wid...

This paper aims at investigating the seismic fragility of confined masonry (CM) structures in Lima, Peru, which can be used to perform earthquake scenarios at urban scale. A database describing the geometric properties (walls density, building area, height) of this type of structure was developed using data from field surveys. This information was complemented with results from experimental tests to compute a large set of capacity curves using a mechanical procedure. These models were tested against a set of ground motion records using the displacement-based earthquake loss assessment (DBELA) procedure, and the structural responses were used to derive fragility functions for four building classes. The resulting fragility curves were convoluted with seismic hazard curves to evaluate the annualized expected loss ratio and annual collapse probability.

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2a edición. Versión 3.0

South America—in particular, the Andean countries—are exposed to high levels of seismic hazard, which, when combined with the elevated concentration of population and properties, has led to an alarming potential for human and economic losses. Although several fragility models have been developed in recent decades for South America, and occasionally used in probabilistic risk analysis, these models have been developed using distinct methodologies and assumptions, which renders any direct comparison of the results across countries questionable, and thus application at a regional level unreliable. This publication aims at obtaining a uniform fragility model for the most representative building classes in the Andean region, for large-scale risk analysis. To this end, sets of single-degree-of-freedom oscillators were created and subjected to a series of ground motion records using nonline...