Recent seismic activity has triggered legislation changes to New Zealand’s building code, and it is now more important than ever that engineers are skilled in the seismic assessment of existing structures.

To that end the Society has scheduled a series of three, full-day seminars in March to outline the implications of these changes. The seminars – Displacement-based Seismic Assessment of Reinforced Concrete Frames – are presented by Tim Sullivan, an Associate Professor at the University of Canterbury, and Didier Pettinga, a Senior Project Engineer at Holmes Consulting in Christchurch.

Tim is a faculty member of the post-graduate ROSE School in Pavia and was previously head of the Design Methods section at the European Centre for Training and Research in Earthquake Engineering at the University of Pavia, Italy.

Prior to starting with Holmes, Didier worked at Glotman Simpson Consulting Engineers in Canada where a significant portion of his work applied Displacement-Based Design principles to high-rise reinforced concrete buildings and post-disaster facilities.

The seminars review features of older structures that can affect their force-displacement response and the types of failure mechanisms that may develop. They also offer an introduction to the displacementbased assessment approach of Priestley et al. (2007), and outline the identification of potentially critical performance limits.

Delegates work through an assessment during the afternoon to become confidence with the displacement-based procedure and leave the seminar with a solution they’ve developed themselves, and which can referred to later in practice.

Who should attend

Designers, local authorities, consulting engineers, project managers and graduate engineers.