A photograph of a room in the Diabetes Centre which has been prepared for repainting. Plastic sheeting has been placed over the carpet and the cracks in the pillar have been filled with epoxy resin.
A photograph of a room in the Diabetes Centre which has been walled off using tarpaulins. Cracks in the wall have been filled with epoxy resin.
Crack repairs on the Rendezvous Hotel in Gloucester Street. Cracks have been injected with epoxy resin using syringes. The epoxy resin leaves a peak around each hole which will be ground down to a smooth surface. The wall will then be repainted. This process actually makes the wall stronger than it was originally.
In order to provide information related to seismic vulnerability of non-ductile reinforced concrete (RC) frame buildings, and as a complementary investigation on innovative feasible retrofit solutions developed in the past six years at the University of Canterbury on pre-19170 reinforced concrete buildings, a frame building representative of older construction practice was tested on the shake table. The specimen, 1/2.5 scale, consists of two 3-storey 2-bay asymmetric frames in parallel, one interior and one exterior, jointed together by transverse beams and floor slabs. The as-built (benchmark) specimen was first tested under increasing ground motion amplitudes using records from Loma Prieta Earthquake (California, 1989) and suffered significant damage at the upper floor, most of it due to lap splices failure. As a consequence, in a second stage, the specimen was repaired and modified by removing the concrete in the lap splice region, welding the column longitudinal bars, replacing the removed concrete with structural mortar, and injecting cracks with epoxy resin. The modified as-built specimen was then tested using data recorded during Darfield (New Zealand, 2010) and Maule (Chile, 2010) Earthquakes, with whom the specimen showed remarkably different responses attributed to the main variation in frequency content and duration. In this contribution, the seismic performance of the three series of experiments are presented and compared.