A photograph of a damaged support beam in the basement of the Copthorne Hotel. A section of the concrete has crumbled, exposing the steel reinforcement underneath.
A photograph of a concrete wall with steel reinforcement visible inside
A photograph of a broken concrete pile with steel reinforcement sticking out of it.
A photograph of the earthquake damage to the Canterbury Television Building on Gloucester Street. Some of the concrete on the columns has crumbled, revealing the steel reinforcement underneath.
A photograph of the earthquake damage to the Canterbury Television Building on Gloucester Street. Some of the concrete on the columns has crumbled, revealing the steel reinforcement underneath.
A photograph of the earthquake damage to the Canterbury Television Building on Gloucester Street. Some of the concrete on the columns has crumbled, revealing the steel reinforcement underneath.
A photograph of a pile of twisted steel reinforcement and other rubble at the entrance to the Smiths City car park on Dundas Street. In the background a section of the collapsed car park has not been demolished yet. Many cars are still parked on the top floor.
A photograph of emergency management personnel inspecting the earthquake damage to a concrete beam inside a building. The concrete near the bottom of the beam has crumbled and the steel reinforcement inside is now exposed.
A photograph of a concrete wall with steel reinforcement visible inside
A photograph of the partially-demolished Smiths City car park, taken from Dundas Street. The front section of the car park has mostly been cleared, though there is still a scattering of rubble and steel reinforcement. The back section has collapsed, but the floors are largely intact, with many cars still parked on the top floor.
A photograph of the earthquake damage to a beam inside the basement of the Copthorne Hotel. A section of the concrete beam has crumbled to reveal the steel reinforcement underneath.
A photograph of the earthquake damage to a concrete beam inside a building. The wall around the beam has been removed to access the beam. Concrete near the bottom of the beam has crumbled and the steel reinforcement inside is now exposed.
A photograph looking east down Dundas Street. Piles of twisted steel reinforcement have been placed on both sides of the street. Several earthquake-damaged cars, recovered from the Smiths City car park, have been stacked on the left. On the other side of the street is an excavator grapple and bucket. In the distance two excavators are sorting through the rubble.
A photograph of the earthquake damage to a stairwell in the Crowne Plaza Hotel on the corner of Kilmore and Durham Streets. Large sections of the concrete wall behind the stair rail have broken away to reveal the steel reinforcement underneath.
A photograph of the earthquake damage to the concrete beams in a room in the PricewaterhouseCoopers Building. Sections of the concrete have crumbled to reveal the steel reinforcement underneath. A number of the ceiling panels are missing and another is hanging loose. Some of the bars that hold the ceiling panels are also hanging loose.
A photograph of a mural on a wall in the former site of a building on Norwich Quay in Lyttelton. Sections of reinforcing steel have been laid up against the mural.
A photograph of a mural on a wall in the former site of a building on Norwich Quay in Lyttelton. Sections of reinforcing steel and other construction material have been laid up against the mural.
Cracks in the parapet of a building on Tuam Street. Steel reinforcement can be seen sticking out of the front wall.
A pile of rubble and steel reinforcement from the Chubb Lock & Safe building on the corner of Kilmore and Manchester Streets.
The old Railway Station clock tower on Moorhouse Avenue with plywood and steel reinforcement covering two sides, a crane hanging over top. The brickwork suffered extensive cracking during the earthquake making it in need for reinforcement. The clock has stopped at around 16:35, the time of the earthquake.
The old Railway Station clock tower on Moorhouse Avenue with plywood and steel reinforcement covering two sides, and a crane hanging over top. The brickwork suffered extensive cracking during the earthquake making it in need of reinforcement. The clock has stopped at around 16:35, the time of the earthquake.
The old Railway Station clock tower on Moorhouse Avenue with plywood and steel reinforcement covering two sides, and a crane hanging over top. The brickwork suffered extensive cracking during the earthquake making it in need of reinforcement. The clock has stopped at around 16:35, the time of the earthquake.
Reinforcement steel protrudes from a bank which is supporting a walkway on Sumner Road. The area has been cordoned off with road cones and security fencing.
The Para Rubber Building on Manchester Street, its demolition nearly complete. A concrete post can be seen in this picture, the steel reinforcement visible out the sides.
During the 2010/2011 Canterbury earthquakes, several reinforced concrete (RC) walls in multi-storey buildings formed a single crack in the plastic hinge region as opposed to distributed cracking. In several cases the crack width that was required to accommodate the inelastic displacement of the building resulted in fracture of the vertical reinforcing steel. This type of failure is characteristic of RC members with low reinforcement contents, where the area of reinforcing steel is insufficient to develop the tension force required to form secondary cracks in the surrounding concrete. The minimum vertical reinforcement in RC walls was increased in NZS 3101:2006 with the equation for the minimum vertical reinforcement in beams also adopted for walls, despite differences in reinforcement arrangement and loading. A series of moment-curvature analyses were conducted for an example RC wall based on the Gallery Apartments building in Christchurch. The analysis results indicated that even when the NZS 3101:2006 minimum vertical reinforcement limit was satisfied for a known concrete strength, the wall was still susceptible to sudden failure unless a significant axial load was applied. Additionally, current equations for minimum reinforcement based on a sectional analysis approach do not adequately address the issues related to crack control and distribution of inelastic deformations in ductile walls.
A photograph of a flight of concrete stairs salvaged from a building and placed in a car park in the Christchurch central city. Steel reinforcement can be seen sticking out of the concrete.
Reinforcement steel protrudes from a bank which is supporting a walkway on Sumner Road. Excavators are lined up on the left-hand side of the road. A sign reading, 'Rebuilding for our future' hangs on the security fence.
A photograph looking into the basement of the Copthorne Hotel. Rolls of carpet and chairs are sitting in a pool of water. To the left there is damage to one of the concrete beams. A section of the concrete has crumbled, exposing the steel reinforcement underneath.
Research following the 2010-2011 Canterbury earthquakes investigated the minimum vertical reinforcement required in RC walls to generate well distributed cracking in the plastic hinge region. However, the influence of the loading sequence and rate has not been fully addressed. The new minimum vertical reinforcement limits in NZS 3101:2006 (Amendment 3) include consideration of the material strengths under dynamic load rates, but these provisions have not been validated at a member or system level. A series of tests were conducted on RC prisms to investigate the effect of loading rate and sequence on the local behaviour of RC members. Fifteen axially loaded RC prisms with the designs representing the end region of RC walls were tested under various loading rates to cover the range of pseudo-static and earthquake loading scenarios. These tests will provide substantial data for understanding the local behaviour of RC members, including hysteretic load-deformation behaviour, crack patterns, failure mode, steel strain, strain rate and ductility. Recommendations will be made regarding the effect of loading rate and reinforcement content on the cracking behaviour and ductility of RC members.
High demolition rates were observed in New Zealand after the 2010-2011 Canterbury Earthquake Sequence despite the success of modern seismic design standards to achieve required performance objectives such as life safety and collapse prevention. Approximately 60% of the multi-storey reinforced concrete (RC) buildings in the Christchurch Central Business District were demolished after these earthquakes, even when only minor structural damage was present. Several factors influenced the decision of demolition instead of repair, one of them being the uncertainty of the seismic capacity of a damaged structure. To provide more insight into this topic, the investigation conducted in this thesis evaluated the residual capacity of moderately damaged RC walls and the effectiveness of repair techniques to restore the seismic performance of heavily damaged RC walls. The research outcome provided insights for developing guidelines for post-earthquake assessment of earthquake-damaged RC structures. The methodology used to conduct the investigation was through an experimental program divided into two phases. During the first phase, two walls were subjected to different types of pre-cyclic loading to represent the damaged condition from a prior earthquake, and a third wall represented a repair scenario with the damaged wall being repaired using epoxy injection and repair mortar after the pre-cyclic loading. Comparisons of these test walls to a control undamaged wall identified significant reductions in the stiffness of the damaged walls and a partial recovery in the wall stiffness achieved following epoxy injection. Visual damage that included distributed horizontal and diagonal cracks and spalling of the cover concrete did not affect the residual strength or displacement capacity of the walls. However, evidence of buckling of the longitudinal reinforcement during the pre-cyclic loading resulted in a slight reduction in strength recovery and a significant reduction in the displacement capacity of the damaged walls. Additional experimental programs from the literature were used to provide recommendations for modelling the response of moderately damaged RC walls and to identify a threshold that represented a potential reduction in the residual strength and displacement capacity of damaged RC walls in future earthquakes. The second phase of the experimental program conducted in this thesis addressed the replacement of concrete and reinforcing steel as repair techniques for heavily damaged RC walls. Two walls were repaired by replacing the damaged concrete and using welded connections to connect new reinforcing bars with existing bars. Different locations of the welded connections were investigated in the repaired walls to study the impact of these discontinuities at the critical section. No significant changes were observed in the stiffness, strength, and displacement capacity of the repaired walls compared to the benchmark undamaged wall. Differences in the local behaviour at the critical section were observed in one of the walls but did not impact the global response. The results of these two repaired walls were combined with other experimental programs found in the literature to assemble a database of repaired RC walls. Qualitative and quantitative analyses identified trends across various parameters, including wall types, damage before repair, and repair techniques implemented. The primary outcome of the database analysis was recommendations for concrete and reinforcing steel replacement to restore the strength and displacement capacity of heavily damaged RC walls.