Brief
A team at the University of Canterbury earthquake laboratory is working on retrofit solutions for precast concrete floors and may have a solution to New Zealand’s seismically vulnerable precast hollow-core concrete floors. “This research is incredibly valuable and detailed and we hope it will give engineers and building owners, especially in the Wellington area, the confidence to start repairing a building instead of demolishing them,” said Jo Horrocks, chief resilience and research officer for the country’s Earthquake Commission.
Insight
A group of New Zealand researchers has found a way to solve the distinct New Zealand construction threat of earthquake-prone, precast concrete, hollow-core floors.
The ReCast Project, led by experts from the Universities of Canterbury and Auckland and supported by funding from the Earthquake Commission, BRANZ and Concrete NZ, has spent the last four years testing and verifying retrofit solutions to strengthen buildings with precast floors, which have been widely used in New Zealand construction since the mid-1980s.
This week, the project team will publish its findings in the Structural Engineering Society NZ (SESOC) journal to provide guidance for engineers and building owners considering retrofit options for existing buildings.
“The seismic issues around hollow-core floors are not new but were brought into the spotlight by the damage caused in the Wellington CBD by the Kaikōura earthquake,” says Nicholas Brooke, coordinator of the ReCast Project. “We focused on the least complex and most affordable retrofit solutions, tested them, verified them and developed design guidance for the different technologies.”
EQC Chief Resilience and Research Officer, Dr Jo Horrocks, says that the Recast Project strikes at the heart of EQC’s vision of investing in research that will strengthen buildings and protect people.
“Precast hollow-core floors have been recognised as a seismic risk for many years and EQC has been eager to support any research that will tackle this issue,” says Dr Horrocks. “This research is incredibly valuable and detailed and we hope it will give engineers and building owners, especially in the Wellington area, the confidence to start repairing a building instead of demolishing them.
Many owners may have been holding off investing in repairs, in fear of having to do more repairs later but, now, they can be confident a retrofit will work.”
READ MORE
Recent Comments