Development of fragility curves for Belgian Unreinforced Masonry Buildings and Characterisation of Seismic Risk

The purpose of this thesis is to develop fragility curves for relevant typologies of the Belgian city of Liège. At first, the relevant typologies, namely the three and four storey unreinforced masonry buildings, are identified by collecting several data sources. The architectural and structural principles of the most relevant typologies are then precisely described, and building archetypes are defined. Finally, the building archetypes are modeled using the TREMURI software based on the equivalent-frame modeling approach. The in-plane response of the models was tested by running displacement adaptive pushover analyses (non-linear static analyses). By generating a set of values for the mechanical properties to take into account their variability, a set of capacity curves was obtained. The N2 method was then applied, first, to idealize the capacity curves into bilinear relationships in the ADRS form, and then, to find the performance points. Each performance point was then compared with defined damage states representing the evolution of the state of the structure. From this comparison, a fragility matrix was obtained which enabled the computation of the fragility functions. The resulting fragility functions were, in turn, used to assess the seismic risk of the city of Liège. An analysis of the impact of the newly obtained fragility curves was performed.