Carlos Molina Hutt visiting RESSLab

PRESENTATION TITLE

Evaluating the seismic risk of existing tall buildings in the Western United States

ABSTRACT

Tall buildings play an important role in the socio-economic activity of major metropolitan areas in the United States. In areas of high seismicity, the design of many existing tall buildings followed historic code-prescriptive requirements that do not provide an explicit understanding of performance during major earthquakes. This presentation will share the results of an evaluation of the seismic risk of these buildings using San Francisco, CA as a case study. By means of an inventory of the existing tall building stock, an archetype building was developed to represent the state of design and construction practice from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. An intensity based assessment was carried out to evaluate performance under a design level earthquake in terms of structural response, economic losses and downtime. Furthermore, conceptual retrofit strategies to achieve increased levels of resilience were also evaluated. In order to benchmark the performance of older existing tall buildings against modern seismic design standards, a comparative risk-based assessment was also carried out to evaluate collapse risk and other performance metrics.

BIOGRAPHY

Carlos Molina Hutt is a member of academic staff in the Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering (CEGE) Department at University College London (UCL) where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses structural analysis and design. Prior to joining UCL, Carlos worked as a structural engineer with Arup in New York, where he gained experience in the design of numerous high rise buildings in Mexico City which adopted a Performance Based Seismic Design approach. Carlos is a registered Professional Engineer (PE) in the State of California in the United States of America and a Chartered Engineer Member of the Institution of Civil Engineers (CEng MICE) in the United Kingdom.

Carlos obtained his master’s degree from Stanford University, where he first gained interest Earthquake Engineering. When he started working as a structural engineer, his continued interest in seismic engineering led him to enrol in a part-time engineering doctorate degree at UCL co-supervised by Stanford University, with Arup as industrial partner. After four years of working at Arup, Carlos relocated to UCL as a member of academic staff to continue his research work towards completion of his part-time PhD within the Earthquake and People and Interaction Centre (EPICentre) and to lecture in UCL’s MSc program in Earthquake Engineering with Disaster Management, as well as the BSc and MSc degree programs in Civil Engineering.

Carlos’ research encompasses computational methods emphasizing nonlinear simulation of structural performance in tall buildings, performance-based earthquake engineering and resilience-based design. Carlos has worked on collaborative research projects involving researchers and practitioners from the United States, China and the United Kingdom.