Studying the mechanical behavior of notched wood beams using full-field measurements

International audienc

The Cartis form for the seismic vulnerability assessment of timber large-span structures

Italy is located in a very active seismic zone, and many earthquakes have marked the country, some of them in the recent past. In order to take adequate measures of seismic prevention and protection, in the last decades, the Italian Civil Protection Department (DPC) initiated a survey and introduced a specific form for the quick and/or post-seismic assessment of buildings. This is useful to obtain statistics on the types of structures and their vulnerability and a judgement on the damage, leading to a decision about the possibility of reuse and/or the level of retrofitting to be applied. Those activities have been developed since the beginning of 2000. This task is currently carried out by the Italian DPC-ReLUIS project research, line WP2 on the inventory of building structures, setting up the CARTIS form for any structural type, like masonry, reinforced concrete, precast concrete, steel, and timber structures, the latter being mainly related to large span buildings, extensively used in Italy. In this context, the paper presents the first draft of the CARTIS form for large span timber structures that provides a general description for typical structural schemes, through the singular points commonly considered as seismic structural vulnerabilities. Moreover, the statistics on timber large span structures based on a sample of 10 buildings is presented

Extension and Validation of Minimalistic Prediction Model to Determine the Energy Production of Offshore Wind Farms

Calculations of annual energy productions of wind farms are normally very computing demanding as they require simulations of the wind flow field inside the wind farms for a range of ambient wind conditions and directions. Although there exists many advanced computing tools for atmospheric flows, which, in principle, cope with all flow situations, most wind power developers rely their work on simplified engineering models based on analytical approaches and superposition of the flow behind a single row of wind turbines. An alternative to wake modeling is the fully developed wind farm array boundary layer model, which assumes that the wind farm is so large, that the wind field inside the wind farm is in equilibrium with the flow field of the ambient atmospheric boundary layer. Such a model was recently further developed by the authors using a simple correction for coping with finite-sized wind farms. The purpose of the present work is to extend further the finiteness correction formula and validate the model by comparing results to actual production data and to results from other simulation models, such as the Jensen, Gaussian and TurbOPark engineering models. In spite of the simplicity of the proposed model, it outperforms the other models, achieving results within 5% accuracy as compared with full-scale data from existing wind farms