Browsing by Author "Echeverria, Maria J."

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    Achieving Functional Recovery through Seismic Retrofit of Existing Buildings: Barriers and Opportunities
    (2023) Echeverria, Maria J.; Mohammadgholibeyki, Negar; Liel, Abbie B.; Koliou, Maria
    Earthquakes can cause extensive damage to buildings, with lengthy impacts in terms of community recovery. As a result, there is a growing interest in design approaches and standards for buildings that ensure postearthquake functional recovery. This paper qualitatively explores barriers and opportunities for achieving functional recovery in the retrofit of existing buildings. The study employs a set of focus groups engaging 21 participants who are experienced in the seismic retrofit of reinforced concrete buildings in the US. Qualitative analysis methods were used to analyze the collected data and to identify the key themes. The thematic analysis revealed three groups of owners and buildings: (1) those for which functional recovery-based retrofit may be achievable, including owners with long ownership time horizons, high-value contents or operations, and buildings whose functions cannot easily be relocated; (2) those for which retrofit for functional recovery is likely not needed nor practical, including buildings whose functions can be distributed to provide geographic redundancy or replaced with remote operations or a different building; and (3) buildings for which life safety retrofits, sustainability upgrades, or other renovations may improve functional recovery even if not explicitly targeted. The study also revealed significant barriers related to retrofit costs, insufficient or inadequate tools and guidelines for retrofit implementation, difficulty in communication of benefits, and a contradiction between community-scale goals and building-scale decisions. Opportunities identified to address these barriers include strategies to improve access to capital and funding, measure and communicate economic and other benefits, and develop tools and guidelines. This study is the first to rigorously explore the feasibility of achieving functional recovery for existing buildings, which make up a major part of the US building stock and are, therefore, significant impediments to postearthquake community recovery. The study suggests actions that can facilitate moving towards functional recovery objectives.
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    Seismic fragility assessment of medium-rise fishbone-type reinforced concrete wall buildings
    (2022) Echeverria, Maria J.; Junemann, Rosita; Liel, Abbie B.
    This paper presents a seismic fragility assessment of medium-rise reinforced concrete (RC) wall buildings, focusing on fishbone-type buildings with high wall densities and other features such as the presence of thin unconfined walls subjected to high axial loads and significantly larger ver-tical irregularities. Such buildings are typical of residential buildings in Chile and other seismic countries. To do so, finite element models of three index buildings with different levels of axial load representing this class of buildings were developed using the software DIANA. Nonlinear time-history analyses were performed to estimate the engineering demand parameters (EDPs) for each building through a multiple stripe analysis. Finding that existing component damage fragility models did not well capture the damage in these buildings, global and local EDPs were examined, recommending new damage limit states better aligned with the expected and previ-ously observed damage to this type of buildings, capturing their critical characteristics (i.e., thin unconfined walls, high axial loads, and flag-shaped walls). This study subsequently shows seismic fragility curves for the three index buildings using the proposed damage limit states. The fragility curves are similar for the same building, whether developed using local or global EDPs. On this basis, it can be concluded that the damage limit states proposed for either type of EDPs can be used to reliably obtain analytical fragility curves for medium-rise RC wall buildings with similar characteristics to those considered in this paper.