The thesis focuses on creating a solution aimed at reducing suffering in earthquake prone regions. The research done resulted in the development of Embrace, a wearable communication device designed to alleviate human suffering during seismic events in seismically active regions like Zagreb. Commencing with an exploration of challenges faced by people living in these quake affected regions, the research aimed to devise a cost-effective, visually appealing solution to these issues.
Methodologies encompassed literature reviews, interviews, cause-effect analysis, and Inside out Design approach, offering crucial insights into user needs and preferences. Following an evaluation of various design concepts, Embrace emerged as the preferred solution, aligning with project requirements.
Embrace integrates LoRa technology for long-range communication, empowering individuals to request aid during earthquakes. Its design process involved modeling with Fusion 360, 3D printing, and utilizing liquid rubber for silicone shells. Sizing considerations, ergonomic enhancements with fillets, and a hierarchy of requirements guided its development.
Future research pathways should include testing Embrace's functionality, exploring diverse shapes and materials, and investigating additional features like smartwatch integration. The thesis resulted in development of Embrace as a significant contribution to wearable technology, enhancing safety and well-being during seismic events.

Façade engineering is facing an era of extraordinary challenge to meet the surge in demand for buildings that are environmentally sustainable and enhance occupant wellbeing. Facades, also known as building envelopes, play a major role in the resource-efficiency of buildings and the quality of its indoor environment. Consequently, the development of effective design approaches is crucial for generating appropriate façade solutions. Façade design is complex and multi-disciplinary involving several and oftentimes conflicting performance criteria. Systematic and holistic design procedures are, therefore, required to achieve optimal trade-offs. Over the last decades, researchers in this field have used computational tools and power to address this challenging problem within the context of multi-criteria design approaches. This paper reviews the existing research in this field, and presents the state-of-the-art review from simple to advanced decision-making procedures currently used at the early design stages, where decisions have a disproportionally large impact on the façade performance. The paper provides a complete description of the design variables and objectives typically involved. Alternative multi-criteria design methodologies regarding discrete decisions and automated optimization are reviewed, each with salient pros/cons, and overall conclusions are drawn. Finally, the paper discusses ongoing trends and research needs, namely, the development of uncertainty-based procedures to enable more informed decision-making; the inclusion of structural/seismic safety considerations in the design process to achieve higher socio-economic benefits; the integration of smart building information modeling and processing technologies to facilitate smarter design decisions; and the adoption of integrated design approaches to promote climate-adaptive solutions that enhance resilience.

@en

Creating safer and more resilient building facades has become a primary concern in contemporary design, particularly in earthquake-prone regions, where there is a potentially high impact on financial, social and environmental losses. Glazed curtain wall systems are widely used in modern architecture. Yet, despite decades of research efforts aimed at enhancing the understanding of their seismic behaviour, it is not clear how design choices affect the response of glazed facades. This is crucial given the wide range of glass, framing and joint variations that are at our disposal. With a focus on unitized curtain walls, this paper provides insights into the influence of design variables on façade seismic response by means of an extensive experimental campaign and an associated parametric study to test alternative designs under both quasi-static and dynamic loading conditions. The variables considered included variations in unit dimensions, glass and joint aspect ratios, joint and framing detailing, and support conditions. This research delves into a statistical analysis of the experimental results, in order to define parameters such as glass and façade unit rotations, frame elongations and distortions, utilization factors at different intensity levels. The results provide insights that guide façade design decisions for achieving desired seismic performance levels.@en

With the increasing number and diversity of disruptive events imposed on the built environment, it is becoming more important to identify a system's resilience. Quantifying resilience is crucial because it enables effective preparation, recovery, and adaptation to the uncertainties that lie ahead. This study focuses on the resilience of building facades, which play an integral role in a building's various functions, including environmental, structural, and operational performance. Facades contribute significantly to the total building damage, yet their resilience is not sufficiently addressed in current discourse. This research aims to bridge this research gap by addressing the question: How can the integrated resilience of a facade system to multiple hazards be identified? A methodology was developed with two objectives: 1) evaluating facade resilience, and 2) integrating this methodology into the facade design process.

The Resilience-based Facade Design Framework assesses the impact of multiple hazards on a building facade, taking into account its fragility. The framework provides a quantitative approach to decision-making regarding facades, both in the early design stage and in retrofitting. Users can input project location, building geometry, and existing facade specifications to create a facade package. This package is then assessed for resilience under different hazards, including seismic and heat hazards. The resilience performance, defined in terms of resilience loss and economic loss, is integrated into a multi-attribute decision-making tool. This tool allows users to select a facade package based on its integrated resilience performance value, or to configure a facade package based on individual enhancements to resilience attributes.

Climate change and extreme heat are critical issues which have been faced all over the world. Consequently, designers strive to monitor and assess the performance of facades by developing environmental assessments at the early design stages, since design changes do not require many resources. Rapid urban expansion in many parts of the world is leading to increased exposure to extreme natural hazards, exacerbated by climate change. It is essential to come up with strategies for mitigating the vulnerability of the built environment. The concept of thermal resilience and adaptation to climate change have gained ground and international attention in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry. Resilience is a multi-facet property which defines the vulnerability of the built environment. Although the qualitative assessment of resilience value, the quantification of urban resilience is not yet representative enough and there is a lack of calculating the resilience in the built environment. However, designers are called to develop building and planning proposals with taking into consideration the thermal resilience of buildings against extreme hazards. This thesis aims to fill the gap between the qualitative and quantitative evaluation of thermal resilience in buildings by considering the operational building performance and the thermal performance of the building envelope in case of extreme heat waves. Towards this direction, the most influential parameters of thermal resilience are identified by implementing a sensitivity analysis process, in the first part. Secondly, a quantification method is presented and the thermal resilience performance for buildings in Amsterdam is calculated. Last, this thesis attempts to develop a computational workflow in order to assist designers and engineers in defining the thermal resilience index from the early design stage. Defining a less computational cost and time-consuming workflow is also a goal. Due to time limitations, the multi-facet aspect of resilience and the difficulty of quantification of its indicators, this research focuses on the ex-ante evaluation of the building envelope by identifying its vulnerability to extreme heat waves.

This research investigates the assessment of thermal resilience in buildings with passive systems during heat waves using innovative computational methods. The study emphasizes the importance of resilient buildings in the face of rising temperatures and explores the concepts of thermal comfort and thermal resilience. A thorough review of existing methods and tools for evaluating thermal comfort and resilience is conducted.
The main objective is to develop a novel computational approach that integrates research findings to assess the thermal resilience of buildings during heatwave conditions. The approach incorporates two specific metrics: simplified metrics and Weighted Unmet Thermal Performance (WUMTP), which are modified to accurately assess thermal resilience in heatwave scenarios. The research also focuses on comparing the performance of these metrics and their effective utilization in assessing thermal resilience.
The computational methods are rigorously evaluated through simulations under controlled scenarios, accompanied by a comprehensive sensitivity analysis. This analysis explores the impact of modifying input parameters on the assessment of thermal resilience and provides insights into the factors influencing building resilience.
By incorporating sensitivity analysis, this research demonstrates the contributions of the developed computational methods, including the modified metrics, in enhancing our understanding of the relationship between design parameters, climatic conditions, and thermal resilience during heat waves.
This study aims to fill the research gap in thermal resilience and address the lack of assessment metrics and tools specifically tailored to heatwave scenarios. It offers valuable contributions to the academic community and practical insights for architects and engineers designing buildings resilient to rising temperatures and heat waves. The comparative analysis of the simplified metrics and WUMTP further enhances our understanding of their strengths and limitations in assessing thermal resilience.

The severe socio-economic impact of recent earthquakes has represented a tough reality check, further confirming the mismatch between society expectations and reality of seismic performance of modern buildings. Life-safety code-compliant design criteria are not enough when dealing with new structures. To raise the bar in terms of structural safety and overall performance objectives, the renewed challenge is defining high-performance buildings able to sustain a design-level earthquake with minimum disruption of business and limited economic losses. To achieve this goal, alternative strategies might be adopted: (a) implementing more advanced design methodologies, (b) increasing the seismic design level, (c) adopting low-damage earthquake-resistant technologies. However, the common perception is that these strategies would lead to unaffordable costs. To support decision-makers, the paper develops a comprehensive parametric study to compare the cost–benefit of reinforced concrete multi-storey buildings designed for increasing levels of seismic intensities (representing a higher seismicity zone or Importance Class) and according to alternative design approaches (Force-based vs. Displacement-based) and technologies (traditional vs. low-damage). Analytical/numerical investigations are carried out to determine the building performance, and loss assessment analyses are performed to compute the Expected Annual Losses of all the parametric configurations. Results, further elaborated through a machine-learning technique, highlight the convenience of implementing more advanced design methodologies, such as a displacement-based approach allowing for a better control of the building response, and the remarkable benefits of applying low-damage technologies, leading to a very high performance and significantly reduced economic losses (> 50%) for a small increase (< 5–10%) of the initial investment cost.

@en

Due to global warming, the Netherlands is experiencing a variety of climatic changes, including temperature rise, increased solar radiation and condensation, low pressure, high humidity, wild-fires, drought, subsidence, changes in ground-water levels, an increased risk of flooding, and downbursts, thunder, wind gusts, and hail. Build-ing materials, including steel, concrete, and timber are affected directly or indirectly by these climatic events.
When it comes to resilience, increasing moisture, temperature, subsidence, and flood dam-age affect structural materials most. Investigating the impact of temperature and flood damage on construction materials was the main goal of the thesis.

For flood assessment, flood loads based on the FEMA coastal construction handbook are used to simulate flooding damages and evaluate the impact on structures. Hand calculations are used to calculate the deflection. Damage evaluation involves calculations from reference cases and utilizes databases such as Hazus, the REDi rating system, and FEMA to determine recovery and repair times. The script for the assessment tool incorporates these calculations, formulas, and numbers. Eventually resulting in a graph based on the dimension of the column and the material, the deflection, damage, recovery time and repair time is returned. The current flood assessment is limited to deflection in terms of structural assessment, but it can easily be expanded to contain stress calculations or other likewise formulas.

Regarding the temperature impact, an empirical concrete corrosion formula calculates mass loss, while the Arrhenius equation assesses the deterioration of wood and steel. A specific formula for concrete corrosion considering the concrete layer is required. Using Faraday's equation, corrosion ratios or material degradation ratios can be converted into mm/year, determining the new cross section size and assessing its impact on structural deflection by anticipating the mass loss. This loss is also directly linked to the structure's performance in a flood, effectively integrating both investigated events.
Both flood assessment and temperature effect approaches are translated into a Python script using packages like open-meteo for climate data, klimaateffectatlas for flood depths, and ifcopenshell for data extraction from IFC models.

When dealing with seismic risk assessment at a large scale, the collection of relevant building data is still deemed a challenging task, often leading to limited building knowledge and, consequently, high uncertainties. Therefore, innovative yet standardized frameworks and adaptive tools are needed to support the seismic risk assessment of buildings. Towards this goal, this paper proposes a simplified multi-knowledge seismic assessment methodology involving the analytical-mechanical SLaMA (Simple Lateral Mechanism Analysis) method. An ad-hoc data collection form is first developed to identify the building vulnerabilities by merging and building on existing institutional forms at the international level and integrating new input data. The data are then used to implement the SLaMA-based methodology, at different building knowledge levels, to assess the seismic safety and the economic losses of buildings. The proposed data structure and approach is planned to be included in the “Seismic-Response” module for PELL (Public Energy Living Lab)-School platform, aiming to become a standardized and interoperable database for relevant data of Italian schools and a dashboard for allowing stakeholders to continuously monitor their energetic and static/seismic conditions. The paper discusses the potential and effectiveness of the proposed procedure for large-scale applications and its integration into platforms assessing the energy efficiency of buildings.

@en