Unique collaboration creates solutions to the unique kiwi building threat

Monday, May 30, 2022, 9:45 am Press Release: Earthquake Commission

A unique collaboration of New Zealand researchers has found answers to fix the threat to New Zealand’s distinct construction of earthquake-prone precast concrete hollow floors.

says Nicholas Brock, ReCast Project Coordinator, who has spent the past four years testing and validating retrofit solutions to reinforce prefabricated buildings, which have been widely used in New Zealand construction since the mid-1980s.

This week, the project team, led by experts from the Universities of Canterbury and Auckland and supported by the Earthquake Commission, BRANZ and Concrete NZ, will publish their findings in the Journal of the Structural Engineering Society of New Zealand (SESOC) to provide guidance for engineers. Building owners are considering retrofit options for existing buildings.

“We’ve focused on, tested, verified, and developed design guidelines for different technologies,” Brooke says.

EQC’s Head of Resilience and Research, Dr. Joe Horrocks, says the reframing project is at the heart of EQC’s vision of investing in research that will strengthen buildings and protect people.

“Precast hollow floors have been recognized as a seismic hazard for many years, and EQC has been eager to support any research that would address this issue,” says Dr. Horrocks.

“This research is incredibly valuable and detailed and we hope it will give engineers and building owners, especially in the Wellington area, the confidence to start repairing a building rather than tearing it down. Many owners may have been putting off investing in repairs, fearing they will have to make more repairs later, but they can Now be confident that the retrofit will work.”

“New Zealand has suffered the devastating effects of earthquakes over the past 11 years, but from that shock we have learned a huge amount and developed world-leading scientific and engineering solutions.

“We will continue to fund excellent research like this, because we know it saves lives and protects property – it’s all part of our role to help New Zealand better prepare for the next earthquake,” says Dr. Horrocks.

Nicholas Brock explains that precast concrete hollow floors have been the preferred choice of the New Zealand construction industry and developers since the mid-1980s and cover approximately 1.5 square kilometers of building floors across the country.

“The rest of the world hasn’t been very enthusiastic about hollow floors, so this is a really distinct New Zealand problem,” says Brooke, who explains that system vulnerabilities were revealed in the 1994 Northridge earthquake in North America where buildings with hollow floors were badly damaged.

Professor Des Paul at the University of Canterbury was concerned about the New Zealand context and thanks to EQC funding he spent nearly two decades investigating hollow floors before developing guidance on their evaluation with Professor Richard Fenwick.

“Unfortunately, they published their findings shortly before the Darfield earthquake and their findings got lost in the chaos of those earthquakes,” says Brooke, who adds that the topic did not receive enough industry attention until the damage from the Kaikoura earthquake prompted authorities and researchers at work.

The ReCast project has been launched with the Universities of Canterbury and Auckland to dedicate four PhD students and one MSc students for a period of four years.

“It was really a unique collaboration with PhD students from Canterbury working in the Auckland lab and vice versa, which we believe has not happened before for anything similar,” Brooke says.

The result was SESOC’s largest magazine with 11 articles and more than 200 pages of design guidelines for earthquake engineers.

“It is the culmination of 25 years of research, building on Des Bull’s work and funding from EQC, that will be of great value to earthquake engineers in New Zealand and beyond.”

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Please click this link for the video content of some tests.

EQC Media Contact:

Coen Lammers

021 730239 | [email protected]

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