Linking seismic resilience into sustainability assessment of limited-ductility RC buildings

While sustainability addresses the economic, social and environmental impacts distributed over the life cycle of a structure; commonly, ordinary events such as construction, normal operation and ageing are considered and the resilience of the structure to extreme events (natural disasters and man-made hazards) is often ignored. This study aims to introduce a framework to systematically integrate seismic-resilience into sustainability assessment of structures/infrastructures. A case study of a multi-story limited-ductility reinforced-concrete (RC) building with soft-story collapse mechanism is presented. This mode of failure is often expected in regions of low to moderate seismicity, where the detailing is poor. A numerical model is constructed based on the results of a number of multi-axis hybrid simulations allowing to realistically capture the three-dimensional response and the damage states of the RC building first-story columns from linear-elastic range to collapse. In addition, the application of carbon-fiber reinforced polymers (CFRP) as a cost-effective and rapid repair strategy in restoring the building columns is studied. The CFRP repair is proposed as an alternative to the demolition of the full building when subjected to large deformations; thereby, significantly enhancing post-disaster reparability and resilience of the structure. The developed numerical models are then used to quantify the sustainability metrics including repair cost, repair downtime and repair environmental impacts. These metrics are quantified by consecutive hazard, structural response, damage state, and recovery loss analyses in accordance to the PEER PBEE methodology. The results are then used to quantify the resilience parameters, including loss of performance and recovery, using the probabilistic resilience-based earthquake engineering (RBEE) approach.