Author Archives: retrofitadmin

At 4.35am, Saturday 4th of September 2010, a M7.1 earthquake struck the east of the South Island in New Zealand. The epicentre was located approximately 45 km west of Christchurch, at a depth of 10km. The epicentre was close to the town of Darfield. At the time of writing, approximately 500+ aftershocks up to M5.4 had been measured.

Preliminary earthquake reconnaissance reports and field observation photographs are ongoingly uploaded at the New Zealand Society of Earthquake Engineering (NZSEE) Virtual Clearinghouse website. Currently, more extensive survey of the damages and field studies are being carried out by researchers from the University of Canterbury and Auckland. Preliminary and published reports on the structural damages and lessons will be uploaded on this website when they become available.

Following the earthquake, several international teams of researhers from USA, Japan and Australia had visited Christchurch to document the scientific and social lessons from this particular event. The Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) reconnaissance team findings are available here. A team from the GEER (Geo-Engineering Extreme Events Reconnaissance) also arrived in Christchurch within days of the event to collect geotechnical data, in collaboration with researchers from universities of Canterbury and Auckland specifically studying the widespread liquefaction across the region.

LINK: Performance of Canterbury bridges to Darfield earthquake – by Alessandro Palermo.

LINK: Preliminary file notes on the performance of unreinforced masonry building in the 2010 Darfield Earthquake – by Jason Ingham and Michael Griffith.

LINK: Detailed ground motion data- by John Zhou.

LINK: Initial impression of the Christchurch earthquake from the EERI Team leader- by Mary Comerio.

Damage to Manchester Courts Damage report on the Manchester Court building- by Jason Ingham and Michael Griffith.

As part of the final phase of the FRST retrofit project, a series of large-scale as-built and retrofitted reinforced concrete (RC) frame structures will be will be tested on the shake table at the Structures Laboratory of the University of Canterbury. The first of these test is a non-ductile RC frame model structure, representative of pre-1970s New Zealand construction practice. The shaking table tests are part of the PhD research of Patricio Quintana Gallo, supervised by Assoc. Prof. Stefano Pampanin, Professor Athol Carr and Professor Patricio Bonelli.

As the opportunity arise, the main testing session is open for public viewing. The as-built frame will be subjected to a strong ground motion, representative of the Wellington design earthquake scenario. The detail of the test is as follow:

Date: 22nd July 2010 (Thursday)
Time: 9.30am (New Zealand time – GMT+12)
Location: Main Structures Lab, Dept of Civil and Natural Resources Engineering.

The test results including a short video of the dynamic test will be posted online shortly after the test. Please check this website for the latest updates.

On Saturday, February 27, 2010 at 06:34 NZT (03:34 Local Time) a M8.8 earthquake struck central Chile, with the epicenter located 35 km offshore of the coast of Maule region (105 km NNE of Concepcion and 335 km SW of Santiago. The earthquake was followed by a tsunami that affected a 200 km long strip of Chilean coast. At the time of the earthquake, one of the project PhD student – Patricio Quintana Gallo was actually at Valparaiso, Chile. He was subsequently invited to join the NZSEE Reconnaissance Team to Chile two months after the event. Further information of that NZSEE Recon mission is available here.

On 30 September 2009 a Richter magnitude 7.6 earthquake occurred approximately 50 km offshore from the Indonesian city of Padang on the west coast of Sumatra. As part of an AusAID initiative, Jason Ingham spent eight days as part of a team conducting detailed structural assessments of damage to school buildings and medical/hospital buildings in the greater Padang region under the jurisdiction of the Australia – Indonesia Facility for Disaster Reduction (AIFDR). Approximately 300 school and 100 medical buildings were assessed during this time. From the data collected, it was possible to identify common structural defects as well as deduce systemic deficiencies in the overall design and construction process for the Padang region.

As part of a research on understanding the motivations in driving seismic retrofit implementation, University of Auckland PhD student Temitope Egbelakin is currently running a survey on the decision-making process in the ongoing seismic retrofit projects. Click here to participate in the survey.Your contribution is hugely appreciated.

We have updated many of the research topic pages which describe in more detailed the different components of this project. As the outputs of the project become available, more information will be uploaded on this website. It is envisioned that in addition to providing an information portal for researchers, this website would be the main source of disseminations to the New Zealand practitioners – engineers, designers, architect and educators.

Alistair Russell, a PhD student at the University of Auckland (and the former co-webmaster of this website), has recently submitted his thesis on the “Assessment of Existing In-Plane Unreinforced Masonry Walls in New Zealand”. Congratulation Alistair!

Recently, a series of pre-1970s non ductile reinforced concrete beam-column joints with cast-in-situ slab has been successfully tested. The testing programme includes benchmark as-built 2D and 3D specimens as well as retrofitted specimens. The tests have shown promising results of the selective-weakening retrofit for beam-column joint as well as confirming the seismic vulnerability of the non-ductile pre-1970s reinforced concrete frames. Three PhD researchers at the University of Canterbury – Umut Akguzel, Kam Weng Yuen and Patricio Quintana-Gallo, under the supervision of Stefano Pampanin, are currently working on the retrofit solutions for reinforced concrete frames.

A new publication, Identifying heritage values in URM buildings by Cass Goodwin, Garrick Tonks and Jason Ingham is now available for download. This article is intended to assist structural engineers in recognising the important heritage aspects of NZ unreinforced masonry (URM) buildings. We are still in the process of collating and uploading the complete publications and output of the project so far. Come back soon for updates.

On the related news – one of the principle investigators of the project – Stefano Pampanin is currently at the L’Aquila region in Italy- in assisting with the reconstruction and seismic retrofit projects. On the 6th April, a magnitude 6.3 earthquake has hit the region, causing over 300 deaths and approximately 65,000 homeless. Amongst other technical activities, Stefano has been involved with onsite monitoring of the intense activities to retrofit several public schools (all reinforced concrete frames with masonry infills) to be ready for the new Academic year (by mid-Sept). The retrofit solutions applied is based on the application of FRP (fiber reinforced polymers) to the vulnerable beam-column joints, very similar to the solutions investigated by Umut Akguzel at the University of Canterbury.

Currently, the project is under going Contract Terminating Review as the project approaches its final year.Part of the process of this review, a thorough report outlining the project progress and evidence of outputs has been complied. In addition to a detailed listing of the key and current outputs in terms of research and dissemination to the public, the report also outlined the delivery of contracted milestone progress. Interested users can download the report.

UOAX0411 Retrofit Solutions Terminating Contract Review Evidence portfolio

We have updated many of the research topic pages which describe in more detailed the different components of this project. As the outputs of the project become available, more information will be uploaded on this website. It is envisioned that in addition to providing an information portal for researchers, this website would provide sufficient technical guidelines and publications for practicing engineers both within New Zealand and around the world. Within the next 12 months, we will be providing with more in-depth reports / journal publications as well as some of the tools developed within the project.

One of the first doctoral students of the project, Dion Marriott will be facing his oral defence within the next couple of days as mentioned in the last update. It is known that his examiner would be the reknown Prof Emeritus Nigel Priestley (of ROSE School/UC San Diego/ Canterbury) and Assoc. Prof Susumu Kono (of Kyoto University).

A total of 8 oral presentations and 7 poster papers will be presented in the 2009 annual national conference on earthquake engineering, organised by the New Zealand Society for Earthquake Engineering (NZSEE) , to be held in Christchurch, New Zealand from 3-5th April 2009. More information on the conference is available here. The full papers and presentations are available for download at both the publications section and at the NZSEE website.

As part of the NZSEE Conference programme, a short tour around the Structural Laboratory of University of Canterbury was organised. Approximately 50 conference attendees, which include prominent earthquake engineering pioneers – Dr Ivan Skinner and Dr Bill Robinson, came along for the brief presentation of the ongoing experimental research at Canterbury.

Several researchers of the Seismic Retrofit Solutions for NZ team have presented their research findings at the 14th World Conference on Earthquake Engineering (14WCEE). Final year Phd candidate, Dion Marriott summarised his recent findings on the design and seismic performance of the use of rocking walls as a retrofit solution. Phd candidate, Kam Weng Yuen presented the preliminary analytical-experimental work on selective weakening techniques for retrofit of existing reinforced concrete structures.

Selective Weakening Techniques for Retrofit of Existing Reinforced Concrete Structures