Projects

The sustainable answer to reducing the seismic vulnerability of steel storage pallet racks is to increase the life cycle and the building-life of the existing stock of racks. This will aid in reducing economic and environmental impact for new constructions but also avoiding downtime in logistics, which may cause huge direct and indirect economic loss. The DESRACK project responds by delivering an innovative seismic dissipative device that will be used to enhance the seismic performance of existing racks. As well-known, the seismic behaviour of racks is strongly influenced by the structural response of the beam-to-column and base-plate connections. The material nonlinearities, as well as the ductility capacity of racks, are concentrated on such components. Therefore, DESRACK targets to improve the strength and ductility of the connections, producing a very cheap dissipator that will be located in the rack connections. After selecting the case studies (i.e. rack configurations), several prototypes of the device will be developed and consequently characterised to obtain their cyclic behaviour in terms of stress-strain relation. The next phase of the project will foresee the integration of the different developed devices in the beam-to-column connections, and a series of cyclic tests for obtaining the moment-rotation relation will be performed. At the same time, an extensive numerical modelling phase of the dynamic behaviour of the selected racks, with and without the device, as well as a numerical calibration of refined models of the connections will assure the extension of the experimental outcomes to additional configurations. The final phase of DESRACK will include the experimental tests of the rack configurations (with and without the device) on the shake-table, simulating hence real earthquakes and comparing in an effective manner the improvements of the device in the seismic performance of the structures. The numerical analyses previously performed on the prediction of the seismic response of the racks will guarantee the success and the completion of the tests. Finally, the project foresees the writing of guidelines aimed to assist the stakeholders in producing and correctly employing the device in practice.