This study develops a practice-oriented method to design non-structural components and their restraints to lower strengths than needed to remain elastic under earthquake ground motion by permitting nonlinear non-structural ...

MBIE/NZSEE guidelines have various methods to assess existing buildings, of which Displacement Based Assessment (DBA) is one. This paper reports on the application of DBA to reinforced concrete (RC) frames where beam-column ...

A building boom in the 1980s allowed pre-stressed hollow-core floor construction to be widely adopted in New Zealand, even though the behaviour of these prefabricated elements within buildings was still uncertain. Inspections ...

There is an increasing recognition that good seismic performance requires not only checks on life-safety but also limitation of damage, disruption and losses. In light of this, several proposals are currently being developed ...

Low Damage Seismic Design (LDSD) guidance material being developed by Engineering NZ is considering a design drift limit for multi-storey buildings of 0.5% at a new damage control limit state (DCLS). The impact of this new ...

Major earthquakes, such as the Canterbury and Kaikoura events recorded in New Zealand in 2010 and 2016 respectively, highlighted that floor systems can be heavily damaged. At a reduced or full scale, quasi-static experimental ...

An automatic fire sprinkler piping system requires an intricate piping network to feed individual sprinklers spread across the plenum space.  In practice, this elaborate piping network is braced against seismic demands ...

The dynamic deformation capacity of a structure is the peak storey drift ratio it can safely withstand without collapsing due to dynamic instability. In a previous study, the authors developed a robust procedure to compute ...