ABSTRACT
There is an ever-growing societal pressure for the development and implementation of earthquake risk mitigation solutions that not only minimize economic, environmental, and social losses due to seismic hazard during the building operational phase, but which also limit the environmental impact associated to the construction and other life cycle stages of the seismic protection product itself. Innovative active mass damper (AMD) devices are ideally placed to meet such societal demands, given their limited quantity of material use and low-maintenance needs, replaceability and recyclability of components. In addition, AMDs also present the added advantage of being particularly non-invasive, thus reducing architectural impact, and of being quickly installable, hence limiting disruption to the use of the building. This study, therefore, discusses life cycle economic, environmental, and social impact evaluations for a case-study building equipped with a novel AMD device, with a view to highlight the advantages, also in comparison with other seismic retrofitting techniques, of such a seismic protection solution under a life cycle perspective.
