Theoretical and experimental study on the contents of hospital buildings

Health care facilities may experience severe earthquake-induced damage that endanger the functionality of the structural system, non-structural components and building contents. Hospitals need to be fully operational for emergency response in the aftermath of moderate-to-severe earthquake ground motions. Modern seismic codes provide vague requirements for the earthquake performance evaluation of hospital building contents. There is an urgent need to provide reliable experimental tests and numerical simulation for the assessment of health care facilities. The present paper is aimed at establishing the limit states for a typical health care room and deriving empirical fragility curves by considering a systemic approach. A full scale three-dimensional model of an ambulatory room has been tested by the shaking table facility of the University of Naples, Italy. The sample room contains a number of typical medical components, which are either directly connected to the panel boards of the perimeter walls or behave as simple free-standing elements. The outcomes of the comprehensive shaking table tests carried out on the ambulatory room have been utilized to derive fragility curves