The Italian Experience – The increasing use of FRP strengthening solutions after recent earthquakes

In the recent years, FRP strengthening has been rapidly grown in Italy. Devastating earthquakes have clearly confirmed the need to adopt effective solutions to mitigate the seismic risk at national scale. The reconstruction processes followed to recent earthquakes demonstrated that FRP strengthening represents a sound and cost-efficient solution to improve the seismic capacity of existing buildings. Furthermore, the definition of economic incentives at national level for seismic strengthening and energy efficiency of existing structures remarked the need to develop fast, sustainable, and integrated strengthening interventions. FRP gained popularity within the engineering community as an effective solution to such needs. This paper presents the statistic on the use of FRP as well as the strengthening layouts mostly adopted in the reconstruction process following recent Italian earthquakes. The costs related to the use of FRP solution to improve the capacity of structural and non-structural members are also presented. Then it reports and discusses the recent experimental tests to validate the effectiveness of FRP based strengthening solutions applicable with a minimum level of disruption and low impact on buildings. The innovative solutions layouts and design procedures have been validated by experimental test programs on members or on full scale structures. The teste results demonstrated the increase in the seismic performance by using the novel FRP-based strengthening layouts that can be applicable operating from the exterior of the building and in combination with energy efficiency interventions.