Description
The evaluation of the structural safety of existing schools and the planning of their retrofit measures are vital and top priority tasks. This research intends (i) to assess the structural safety of a steel school building in Italy and (ii) to suggest retrofitting measures to improve its seismic resilience. The first section describes and discusses the data collection and the numerical model developed, representative of the existing building. Pushover analyses are then conducted to evaluate the seismic performance of the completed structure. Based on the identified shortcomings, a novel strengthening intervention using 2D parallel steel exoskeletons was developed following a displacement-based step-by-step method. The exoskeleton systems were designed considering the architectural and functional needs of the school building, with the goal of maintaining structural safety while preserving the building's aesthetics and usability. Lastly, the efficacy of the chosen retrofitting method was verified through non-linear static analysis conducted on the reinforced structure.
