Abstract

Speaker bio

Maria is a Research Associate in the Structures Group. Her primary interest lies in the development of more reliable methods for the design of structures to resist extreme events, particularly earthquakes and blasts. Her research experience spans from earthquake engineering to structural robustness, across a wide range of structural systems, including steel and reinforced concrete buildings, masonry construction, and non-structural components. She holds a PhD and an MSc from Imperial College London, and an MEng from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece.

Abstract

This talk covers two topics in structural engineering: earthquake resilience and heritage structures preservation. Despite notable progress in earthquake engineering, significant damage or even collapse is still seen, especially in long-duration seismic events, as current codes do not account for strong motion duration. The first part of the talk addresses this gap by examining the impact of earthquake duration on the collapse of steel buildings. Through incremental dynamic analyses, it is shown that longer earthquakes reduce the collapse resistance by up to 60%, and predictive models for the collapse capacity are developed with due account of duration. Examples of their application and simple procedures for their integration into seismic codes are also presented. The second part focuses on strengthening heritage masonry using textile-reinforced mortar (TRM) systems. The effectiveness of TRM in this context is not fully understood, and existing models are often based on limited datasets. This talk presents an experimental and analytical study of TRM -strengthened masonry representative of heritage structures in Historic Cairo. Using digital image correlation, the contribution of TRM is quantified, and analytical models are developed, which can reliably predict the performance of TRM -strengthened heritage masonry, supporting its long-term preservation.