OBIETTIVI FORMATIVI

The course deals with the safety assessment of existing buildings. Differently from the perspective of design of new constructions, the behavior of the structure is unknown at the beginning of the analysis requiring effective procedures to face the problem of such incomplete knowledge that involves both aleatory and epistemic (e.g. related to the effectiveness of structural details) uncertainties. The course faces both issues related, on the one hand, to the diagnosis to ordinary actions and, on the other, to the prevention against rare events. The wide variety of behaviors that characterize no standardized existing buildings makes more conventional the use of methods of analysis quite common in the design of new structures, such as the linear ones. For this reason, the course devotes large attention to the nonlinear static procedures. Finally, among rare actions, since existing buildings have been often conceived without specific rules for the seismic action, such vulnerability constitutes one of most relevant which the course focuses to, with particular attention to both masonry and reinforced concrete structures.