Leaders: Liam Wotherspoon (l.wotherspoon@auckland.ac.nz) and Tim Sullivan (timothy.sullivan@canterbury.ac.nz)
Opportunity
The resilience of vertical infrastructure (residential, commercial and industrial buildings) and horizontal infrastructure networks (electric power, transportation, telecommunications, three waters, and liquefied/gas fuels) play a significant role in everyday society. Following a shock natural hazard event, they play a critical role in the ability of society to rapidly recover. This research, founded by Resilience to Nature Challenges (http://resiliencechallenge.nz/), will result in the development of improved approaches for the design and assessment of the built environment, new tools to quantify the performance of the built environment and better quantification of the interaction between different components of the built environment. These developments will inform actions that can reduce the direct and indirect impacts during future natural hazard events. High resolution modelling across a range of regions and natural hazard will provide an evidence base to inform the breadth of resilience strategies that can be operationalised through asset management and loss estimation methodologies.
workstream
This workstream will seek to identify effective means of reducing the damage and disruption caused by future earthquakes. The research will focus on two main research areas
- Quantifying and mitigating the risk (in terms of monetary losses) associated with different design solutions and building technologies.
- Supporting the development of design and assessment standards for NZ buildings to enable enhanced performance objectives to be achieved in practice.
Although improvements in earthquake related resilience will be the focus, it is expected that this will also improve the resilience against other shock events. The research will lead to a better understanding of the mechanics and fragility of various building typologies, considering effective retrofit options and reparability of buildings post-earthquake, extending on recent developments made in QuakeCoRE.
With the above in mind, research into the quantification and mitigation of losses will focus on:
- Execution of a broad benchmarking study to clearly define the seismic performance, in terms of expected annual monetary losses due to direct repair costs, of various code-compliant building typologies in different parts of New Zealand.
- Development of tools and guidelines to quantify the reparability of buildings. In particular, steps will be made to establish improved criteria for repair versus replacement of steel structures in post-earthquake scenarios.
- Development of new guidance for the assessment and rehabilitation of earthquake-damaged reinforced concrete structures.
- Development of tools to account for soil-foundation-structure interaction effects on building performance.
- Identification, for marae, of effective resilience interventions and decision making processes against natural hazards.
Research in support of design and assessment standards for New Zealand buildings will focus on:
- Execution of a broad benchmarking study to clearly define the seismic performance, in terms of expected annual monetary losses due to direct repair costs, of various code-compliant building typologies in different parts of New Zealand (this activity is common to RA1 and RA2).
- Draft revisions to NZS1170.5 serviceability limit state design criteria aimed at effectively mitigating losses to new buildings in future earthquakes.
- Identify revisions that could be made to structural performance factors within NZS1170.5 to better achieve modern performance objectives.
- Identify possible changes to NZS3604 that would effectively limit financial losses to New Zealand residential buildings in future earthquakes.
- Identify effective means of accounting for cascading effects of earthquake and tsunami on New Zealand buildings within NZS1170.5.
Monthly Meetings