CESS: Seminar on Earthquake Engineering

Prof. Michael Griffith will give a seminar on "Performance of Unreinforced Masonry Walls under Seismic Loads" on Wednesday 24.5.2017 at 12:15 in GR A330. More information here.

Abstract: Unreinforced masonry buildings are very vulnerable to earthquake loading. Such buildings can fail due to in-plane or out-of-plane failure modes. Professor Griffith’s research group is a leading group in the field of the seismic response of masonry buildings in general and the development of out-of-plane assessment methods in particular. He will give a brief overview of Adelaide University’s Structural Engineering Research Group and their research interests at the University of Adelaide before highlighting recent and ongoing research into the seismic behaviour of unreinforced masonry (URM) construction. His talk will focus primarily on:

• the seismic vulnerability of URM to out-of-plane bending and the associated local failure mechanisms;
• feasibility of near surface mounted FRP strips for seismic retrofit of URM walls;
• preliminary results of recent in-situ testing of clay brick cavity walls in ‘1960s constructed’ Adelaide houses which are being demolished for road widening projects; and
• influence of flexible floor and roof diaphrams on the seismic response of URM buildings.

Bio: Michael Griffith is Professor in the School of Civil, Environmental and Mining Engineering at the University of Adelaide. He obtained his PhD in Structural Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley (1988) after completing his BSc (Civil Eng.) and MSc (Civil Eng.) degrees at Washington State University in the US. Dr. Griffith is a member of the Standards Australia ‘Earthquake Loading Code’ committee, a Fellow of the Institution of Engineers, Australia, state committee member of the SA Structural College and Past-President and now Honorary Life Member of the Australian Earthquake Engineering Society. His main professional and research interests are in the field of earthquake engineering and structural dynamics with a particular interest in the performance of unreinforced masonry structures in earthquakes. He has co-authored over 200 research papers in the field of structural engineering and sits on the Board of Directors for the International Association of Earthquake Engineering which is based in Tokyo.