SEI at MTU Professional Presentation Series

EARTHQUAKE RESISTANT TO SEISMICALLY RESILIENT, DIVERGING FROM THE DISPOSABLE BUILDING

Modern seismic design codes focus on life-safety or collapse prevention for typical buildings, leading to structures that are severely damaged and/or difficult to repair after a design level earthquake. This performance objective has been in place for over half a century and is severely outdated. In recent decades, there has been a critical shift in development of alternative seismic force resisting systems (SFRSs) that promotes a change in paradigm from the disposable building performance objective of collapse prevention. Some of these technologies include structures with self-centering capabilities and replaceable structural fuses. The beneficial impacts these alterative SFRSs could have in densely urbanized areas can be realized by observation of the significant past socioeconomic losses that have occurred worldwide due to large earthquake events in recent decades. Accordingly, there is an increased awareness by owners and other stakeholders to consider rapid reparability and reducing downtime of structures post-seismic event. With the recent inclusion of performance-based earthquake engineering in current seismic design codes, this affords the opportunity and heightened motivation to design structures beyond the minimum performance objective of life safety. This talk will present an introduction to some of these seismically resilient SFRSs in promoting seismically resilient buildings structures.

About the Presenter
Dr. Dowden is an Assistant Professor at Michigan Technological University. He received his Ph.D. from the University at Buffalo (UB) in 2014. Upon graduating from UB he stayed on for two years as a testing engineer conducting service-to-industry seismic qualification shake-table testing at the Structural Engineering and Earthquake Simulation Laboratory at the University at Buffalo. Prior to receiving his Ph.D., he was a practicing structural engineer in Seattle, WA for ten years responsible for the design and project management of new building construction and seismic rehabilitation of existing building projects.

Interested? Use the following link on November 14, at 5 PM EST to watch the presentation LIVE and ask questions from the presenter!!

https://michigantech.zoom.us/j/560528268

More information