the objective of this paper is to present a new method for protecting the lives of residents in catastrophic earthquake failures of unreinforced masonry buildings by introducing some safe rooms within the buildings. the main idea is that occupants can seek refuge within the safe rooms as soon as the earthquake ground motions are felt. the information obtained from the historical ground motions ...

Abstract The main vulnerability models available in the literature aim to develop damage fragility curves estimate level suffered by a building after seismic event. However, recent earthquakes have highlighted great importance of predicting usability residential buildings, i.e. condition being habitable or occupiable performance can be used as an indicator for allocating economic funding event ...

The recent re-assessment of the seismic hazard in Europe led for many regions of low to moderate seismicity to an increase in the seismic demand. As a consequence, several modern unreinforced masonry (URM) buildings, constructed with reinforced concrete (RC) slabs that provide an efficient rigid diaphragm action, no longer satisfy the seismic design check and have been retrofitted by adding or ...

The effect of the vertical component earthquakes on structural behaviour unreinforced masonry (URM) walls is usually not considered by technical codes for ordinary buildings. Recent scientific literature, however, indicates that earthquake may play a significant role in crack pattern URM and their collapse. This paper investigates seismic capacity damage scenario two-story regular wall, describ...