This poster presents preliminary results of ongoing experimental campaigns at the Universities of Auckland and Canterbury, aiming at investigating the seismic residual capacity of damaged reinforced concrete plastic hinges, as well as the effectiveness of epoxy injection techniques for restoring their stiffness, energy dissipation, and deformation capacity characteristics. This work is part of wider research project which started in 2012 at the University of Canterbury entitled “Residual Capacity and Repairing Options for Reinforced Concrete Buildings”, funded by the Natural Hazards Research Platform (NHRP). This research project aims at gaining a better understanding and providing the main end-users and stakeholders (practitioner engineers, owners, local and government authorities, insurers, and regulatory agencies) with comprehensive evidence-based information and practical guidelines to assess the residual capacity of damaged reinforced concrete buildings, as well as to evaluate the feasibility of repairing and thus support their delicate decision-making process of repair vs. demolition or replacement.
This research investigates the validation of simulated ground motions on complex structural systems. In this study, the seismic responses of two buildings are compared when they are subjected to as-recorded ground motions and simulated ones. The buildings have been designed based on New Zealand codes and physically constructed in Christchurch, New Zealand. The recorded ground motions are selected from 40 stations database of the historical 22 Feb. 2011 Christchurch earthquake. The Graves and Pitarka (2015) methodology is used to generate the simulated ground motions. The geometric mean of maximum inter-story drift and peak floor acceleration are selected as the main seismic responses. Also, the variation of these parameters due to record to record variability are investigated. Moreover, statistical hypothesis testing is used to investigate the similarity of results between observed and simulated ground motions. The results indicate a general agreement between the peak floor acceleration calculated by simulated and recorded ground motions for two buildings. While according to the hypothesis tests result, the difference in drift can be significant for the building with a shorter period. The results will help engineers and researchers to use or revise the procedure by using simulated ground motions for obtaining seismic responses.
The University of Canterbury is known internationally for the Origins of New Zealand English (ONZE) corpus (see Gordon et al 2004). ONZE is a large collection of recordings from people born between 1851 and 1984, and it has been widely utilised for linguistic and sociolinguistic research on New Zealand English. The ONZE data is varied. The recordings from the Mobile Unit (MU) are interviews and were collected by members of the NZ Broadcasting service shortly after the Second World War, with the aim of recording stories from New Zealanders outside the main city centres. These were supplemented by interview recordings carried out mainly in the 1990s and now contained in the Intermediate Archive (IA). The final ONZE collection, the Canterbury Corpus, is a set of interviews and word-list recordings carried out by students at the University of Canterbury. Across the ONZE corpora, there are different interviewers, different interview styles and a myriad of different topics discussed. In this paper, we introduce a new corpus – the QuakeBox – where these contexts are much more consistent and comparable across speakers. The QuakeBox is a corpus which consists largely of audio and video recordings of monologues about the 2010-2011 Canterbury earthquakes. As such, it represents Canterbury speakers’ very recent ‘danger of death’ experiences (see Labov 2013). In this paper, we outline the creation and structure of the corpus, including the practical issues involved in storing the data and gaining speakers’ informed consent for their audio and video data to be included.
