ABSTRACT
In recent years, a great mount of wooden houses in Japan have suffered severe damage such as large deformation and collapsing phenomenon against several earthquakes with Magnitude 7 to 9, because most of the collapsed wooden houses were built by old earthquake resistant design codes before 1981. Seismic retrofitting policy for old wooden house is an urgent and important issue in Japan to solve as quickly as possible. Japanese Government has been demanding a numerical target which local self-governments quickly improve a seismic retrofitting ratio for all buildings. This numerical target of seismic retrofitting ratio for wooden house, reinforced concrete (RC) and steel (S) building structures is up to 90% until 2017. Therefore, one of the authors has already developed an advanced seismic retrofitting method for existing RC and S building structures using ACM bracing method, which consists of Carbon Fiber Reinforced Plastic (CFRP) plate and steel plates (Takatani 2011, Takatani 2012a).
