At the request of the city council of Wellington (NZ), in collaboration with Dicar of University of Pavia, a peer review of the Detailed Seismic Assessment (DSA) of a three-storey brick masonry located in Newtown has been conducted.
A DSA of the building was conducted by means of FEM nonlinear time history analyses (NLTHA) in order to determine the current state of the building by rating the building performance as a percentage of the New Building Standard (NBS), and to provide information for the modelling and concept design of potential retrofit interventions to achieve 67% NBS.
The peer review by Sismica360 concerned the assessment complied with the requirements of the New Zealand (NZ) guidelines for The Seismic Assessment of Existing Buildings, the validation of the calculations included in the original DSA report of the Building, and the review of the reasonableness of the retrofit interventions proposed by the originating engineer. The following bullet points outline the activities Sismica360 has pursued to carry out this evaluation:
- Review of the on-site inspections and material characterisation process;
- Validation of the non-linear analyses results, employing an equivalent-frame model with macroelements, generated using the 3Muri software;
- Check of the ground-motion selection and scaling procedure for the conduct of NLTHA;
- Revision of the calculations for the assessment of the local out-of-plane response according to the procedures outlined in the NZ guidelines;
- Verification of the appropriateness of the proposed potential retrofit interventions.