Seismic Vulnerability Assessment and Retrofitting of the Great Hall of The University of Sydney

The aim of this thesis is to elaborate a reliable approach for the design of seismic retrofitting interventions for masonry structures. In order to achieve this objective, the presented work has been organised in two parts. The first part focuses on the description of the key aspects of the proposed approach. Firstly, it has been reported the contribution of the Italian research activity, to which the approach owes its origin. Then, the methodological procedure to be adopted for the design of the correct retrofitting intervention has been described, with particular attention to the case of monumental masonry structures. Finally, some of the most common retrofitting interventions and two methods to evaluate the structural response have been reported. In the second part, the reliability of the presented approach has been verified by applying the methodological procedure to the case study, the Great Hall of The University of Sydney. The effectiveness of the proposed retrofitting interventions have been assessed by creating a Strand7 model of the Great Hall, in order to evaluate its structural response. The obtained results show that the proposed retrofitting interventions for the case study are extremely effective and ultimately proves the reliability of the proposed approach.