EESD at the 16th World Conference on Earthquake Engineering

At the 16th WCEE in Santiago, Chile (January 9-13, 2017), Katrin Beyer gave an invited lecture with the title "Deformation capacity of unreinforced masonry elements – from empirical to analytical models", which highlighted EESD's research on drift capacity models for stone and brick masonry and put forward new ideas with regard to capturing the effect of stone masonry patterns on the drift capacity. Further papers on our research on masonry structures were presented by Francesco Vanin and Bastian Wilding. Francesco presented a force-based beam element model for masonry walls failing in flexure. A new integration scheme and a newly implemented biaxial stress-strain relationship allow to capture the interaction of shear and flexure and predict the location of the failure correctly. Bastian’s paper presents key features of his analytical model for masonry walls, which is the first analytical model also applicable to walls failing in shear.

With regard to EESD’s work on reinforced concrete structures, João Almeida and Angelica Rosso presented EESD’s latest experimental and numerical results on the out-of-plane instability of boundary elements of thin walls, which are very common in large parts of Central and South America. Danilo presented a new displacement-based beam element that allows to model axial strains in reinforced concrete columns and walls much more accurately than the classical displacement- or force-based beam element. In addition, Katrin Beyer presented a review of existing work on the effect of bi-directional loading on reinforced concrete walls, which is the result of an international collaboration and also Ioannis Drakatos' work on a model for the cyclic response of interior slab-column connections.

Further papers in collaboration with other researchers included a paper on the modelling of U-shaped walls (with Prof.Kristijan Kolozvari, California State University, Fullerton) and on the assessment of plan-irregular wall buildings (with Dr. Matthew Fox, Beca, NZ and Prof. Tim Sullivan, University of Canterbury, NZ).

All papers are available on Infoscience: http://eesd.epfl.ch/publications