Evaluation of Different Configurations of Steel Exoskeletons for the Seismic Retrofit of Existing Buildings

In recent years, integrated and holistic approaches have been proposed to address the urgent need to renovate the building stock from different perspectives. In order to overcome one of the main obstacles to renovation, namely the relocation of residents, solutions have been proposed for seismic retrofitting to be carried out from outside the building. In this context, different technical solutions have been developed for RC buildings with shear walls or shell structures. Within these two macro-categories, further classifications of the retrofit solution can be defined based on the materials used or the structural schemes employed. In this work, different arrangement configurations of steel exoskeletons with bracing-like configurations are analyzed. The loading requirements on the different components are investigated considering different boundary conditions (fixed, pinned). Parametric analyses were performed to evaluate the performance under the different static schemes.