ABOUT THE ASSESSMENT OF SEISMIC CAPACITY OF MULTISTORY VENTILATED FAÇADES

Seismic design of building envelopes requires specialized methodologies for the evaluation of seismic demand and for the assessment of seismic capacity of such nonstructural components. This paper aims to describe an innovative approach for the assessment of multi-story ventilated façades seismic capacity, by means of an experimental method specifically designed for these nonstructural components. A test equipment, purposefully designed and constructed for assessing the seismic capacity of either building envelopes or their most significant components, is presented in the paper. On the other hand, an innovative testing protocol is proposed to adapt recent code provisions to building envelopes. The methodology herein presented also includes the definition of appropriate damage states (DSs) for the specific nonstructural component under examination, and the identification of two engineering demand parameters (EDP) that can schematically describe the seismic capacity of ventilated façades, namely (i) the out-of-plane acceleration recorded in the center of masses of the kit, and (ii) the in-plane inter-story displacements. An application of the testing set to a specific ventilated façade system is shown. Following the description of the specimen and the test setup, the paper shows how the proposed methodology can be applied to the selected component in order to assess its seismic capacity, based on out-of-plane dynamic and in-plane quasi-static tests. Considerations about the use of this innovative testing set to different types of building envelopes and to their specialized components are finally included in the work.