Recent earthquakes evidenced that many building structures may have a poor performance in future seismic events. Some of the design verifications, as the ones related with the irregularities in buildings check, their impact in the behaviour factor that can be considered in design for the different structural systems, the global and local ductility checks, the detailing rules to be satisfied for each structural element, the consideration of the influence of infills in the structural response, the design of beam-column joints, among other design rules, may not be of easy adoption in certain situations by the designers. All this justifies the continuous development of the seismic design rules and requirements included in the codes, aiming to reach rigorous design guidelines with acceptable level of complexity, avoiding misinterpretations and errors in their application by the designers. These aspects will be discussed in the Seminar.

Speaker : Humberto Varum is full professor and director of the PhD Program in Civil Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, Portugal. Since May 2015, he is member of the directorate body of the Construction Institute from the University of Porto, and President since May 2019. He has been Seconded National Expert to the ELSA laboratory, Joint Research Centre, European Commission, Italy, in the period July 2009 to August 2010. He was member of the Project Team 2 for the development of the 2nd generation of EN Eurocodes (SC8.T2 - material dependent sections of EN 1998-1).