Development of Fragility Curves for the Evaluation of a Reinforcement Technique on Unreinforced Masonry Patrimonial Buildings in Caracas, Venezuela

Abstract eng:
The purpose of this paper is to obtain fragility curves to (a) evaluate the seismic vulnerability of a Unreinforced Masonry (URM) patrimonial building in Caracas and (b) the effect of a rehabilitation technique in reducing the seismic vulnerability of the building. The two-story building selected is known as “Casa Amarilla Antonio José de Sucre” and is located in downtown Caracas. This building suffered slight damages during the 1812 earthquake. The strengthening technique studied in this paper consisted of an application of welded steel meshes covered with shotcrete on the URM walls. The log-normal fragility curves were obtained considering four performance levels such as slight, moderate, severe, and complete structural damage. The building, with and without reinforcement, was modelled using the finite element method. Then, several pushover nonlinear analyses were performed to obtain the fragility curves for main orthogonal directions of the building's floor plan. Finally, a study of the rehabilitation technique was performed considering several amounts of steel reinforcement to evaluate the effect of the seismic vulnerability reduction. The results show that vertical and horizontal steel amounts of about 0.62 cm2 per meter in each face of the URM walls are enough to achieve seismic vulnerability reductions between 7.5 % and 14.6 % for several earthquake scenarios.

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