ABSTRACT
Current practice in seismic protection of new and existing buildings is today largely oriented to the combined use of advanced materials and technologies, possibly endowed with reversibility features, in order to achieve an optimised performance from all points of view. Innovative materials for the purposes of seismic protection are essentially materials like: Special Steels, Aluminium and Titanium Alloys, Fibre Reinforced Polymers (FRP), Geotextiles, Elastomers and, last but not least, “smart” materials like Shape Memory Alloys (SMA), Piezoelectric Materials, Magnetorheological Fluids, etc. Most of these materials are used to create special devices provided with energy dissipative features, as well as to obtain advanced strengthening systems especially designed for improving both resistance and ductility of structural elements. Likewise, innovative systems can be based on either an increase of dissipated energy (Additional structural damping) or on a reduction of the seismic input energy (Base isolation and Tuned Mass Damper). These techniques are applied by means of either special devices (e.g. Yielding Metal Devices, Friction Devices, Fluid Viscous Dampers, Rubber Bearings, etc.) or advanced bracing systems (Mandara, 2007).
