Projects per year
Abstract
Malawi is located within the southern branch of the active East African Rift System, where earthquakes of Mw 7.0 (or greater) can occur along major faults. In Malawi, the majority of dwellings in both formal and informal settlements are non-engineered unreinforced masonry constructions, built by local artisans with little input from engineers. These constructions are highly vulnerable to seismic events due to poor materials and lack of construction detailing. This study develops analytical vulnerability functions that enable the assessment of seismic capacity of typical buildings in Malawi. Since the seismic vulnerability greatly depends on building characteristics, geometrical and structural data are collected by conducting semi-rapid surveys of 300 houses located in urban and rural areas of Central and Southern regions of Malawi. Mechanical properties of the local materials are also obtained from an experimental campaign. In this work, a mechanical method FaMIVE (Failure Mechanism Identification and Vulnerability Evaluation) is adopted and the effects of both in-plane and out-of-plane behaviour of the masonry structures are taken into consideration to derive capacity curves for seismic vulnerability assessment. Special attention is given to 1) the Malawian building typologies as described in the Word Housing Encyclopedia and 2) failure mode classes for the Malawian constructions as calculated by FaMIVE. Hence, the derived vulnerability functions can serve as a benchmark for typical buildings in Malawi. The results and conclusions are also relevant for other East African countries, where similar construction techniques are adopted.
Original language | English |
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Publication status | Published - 26 Jun 2019 |
Event | 7th International Conference on Computational Methods in Structural Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering - Crete, Greece Duration: 24 Jun 2019 → 26 Jun 2019 |
Conference
Conference | 7th International Conference on Computational Methods in Structural Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering |
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Country/Territory | Greece |
City | Crete |
Period | 24/06/19 → 26/06/19 |
Structured keywords
- PREPARE
Keywords
- non-engineered masonry constructions
- mechanical approach
- seismic vulner-ability
- capacity curves
- East African Rift System
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Dive into the research topics of 'Seismic Vulnerability Assessment of Non-engineered Masonry Buildings in Malawi'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.Projects
- 1 Finished
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PREPARE: Enhancing PREParedness for East African Countries through Seismic Resilience Engineering
Biggs, J. J. & Macdonald, J. H. G.
1/05/17 → 31/03/22
Project: Research, Parent
Datasets
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Novelli_COMPDYN_2019
Novelli, V. (Creator), De Risi, R. (Creator), Ngoma, I. (Creator), Kafodya, I. (Creator) & Macdonald, J. H. G. (Data Manager), University of Bristol, 24 Apr 2019
DOI: 10.5523/bris.2dqckine9t2rk2k1t0ifxt1ac5, http://data.bris.ac.uk/data/dataset/2dqckine9t2rk2k1t0ifxt1ac5
Dataset