Functional Recovery in Modern Reinforced Concrete Buildings

Published

July 5, 2024

Author(s)

Dustin Cook, ABBIE LIEL, Amir Safiey

Abstract

In the field of structural engineering, functional recovery is a new, but non-standardized building design objective intended to improve a building's capacity to maintain or rapidly restore basic intended functions after a hazard event, such as an earthquake. The major goal of the functional recovery design objective is to support community resilience by providing more robust community infrastructure assets in a disaster recovery environment. Current building design standards, which target life-safety performance objectives, provide limited requirements to ensure buildings maintain, or rapidly recover function after earthquakes or other extreme events. Therefore, the expected building performance, in terms of functional recovery, that is provided by current building codes is unclear. This study quantifies the functional recovery performance for a set of 60 reinforced concrete archetype buildings to compare expected recovery times from buildings designed according to life-safety provisions with buildings designed to meet enhanced minimum strength and stiffness requirements and identify structural design and response characteristics that correspond with rapid post-earthquake recovery. Results from this study indicate that the estimated functional recovery time for reinforced concrete buildings designed to life safety standards may be longer than one year for design-level earthquakes. Additionally, while increased strength and stiffness requirements significantly reduce the likelihood of a building being marked as unsafe due to structural damage, additional design provisions for nonstructural components are required in order to ensure a high confidence of rapid recovery.

Citation

Journal of Structural Engineering

Pub Type

Journals

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Keywords

Functional Recovery, Performance-Based Design, FEMA P-58, Reinforced Concrete

Citation

Cook, D. , LIEL, A. and Safiey, A. (2024), Functional Recovery in Modern Reinforced Concrete Buildings, Journal of Structural Engineering, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=956279 (Accessed April 24, 2026)

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