Towards Earthquake Risk Reduction Solutions: Applications of Composite Materials and Future Challenges

The development of fast, sustainable, and integrated strengthening interventions with direct benefits in terms of earthquake risk reduction is a challenging task. It is nowadays crucial to develop performance-based solution to increase the capacity of existing structures, commonly affected by significant deterioration and designed without modern seismic design provisions. The use of composite materials and innovative solutions has experienced a continuous increase in the last decade in the Mediterranean area both for structural members upgrading and retrofit applications. Composite materials solutions with a low level of disruption and low impact represents the future for the retrofit of existing structures. They represent the most suitable option for local strengthening interventions on structural and nonstructural components of reinforced concrete (RC) existing structures exploiting the advantage of negligible modification in mass and lateral stiffness with the capability to meet requirements of fast, low impact and cost-effective interventions. The paper presents different solutions based on the use of composite materials to prevent the most common brittle and premature failure modes in case of seismic actions. The innovative solutions layouts and design procedures as well as the experimental programs carried out by the research group of the Department of Structures for Engineering and Architecture of University of Naples Federico II on members or full-scale structures to validate their effectiveness are herein presented and briefly discussed. The experimental results show the high potential of composite materials in recovering and enhancing the capacity of RC members and reduce the damage to infills; they are applicable with a low impact or entirely from the exterior of the building and in combination with energy efficiency interventions.