JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #56 - April 2010 - 79

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Intelligent composite “seismic wallpaper”
Following the L’Aquila earthquake, a research team coordinated by Italian engineering consulting company D’appolonia redoubled their efforts to design protection solutions for buildings exposed to natural disasters. The project focuses on an intelligent composite “seismic wallpaper” for the reinforcement, strengthening, monitoring and management of civil infrastructure vulnerable to earthquakes.

he Spring 2009 earthquake in L’Aquila (central Italy) killed some 300 people and destroyed 15,000 houses.

Following the catastrophe, the job of the civil engineers was to assess the state of the buildings that were still standing and to decide how to reinforce them. The engineers elected to use engineered carbon- or glass-fibre fabrics as reinforcement.

The Polytect project
In the Venice area, 500 kilometres away from the earthquake’s epicentre, a research centre has been tasked under the European Polytect research project with designing textiles for the future – in this case, materials capable of protecting buildings that are vulnerable to natural catastrophes such as earthquakes or landslides The technology goes even further, as the materials are equipped with sensors capable of assessing any damage. One of the engineers at the centre, Thomas B. Messervey, explains: “The idea is simple. You have to manage to make the buildings resemble the human body more, and build a skin for them. So, by cross-referencing the information obtained from the sensors, the state of the building can be monitored over the long term and a

sort of structural model can be built. All this can be used to try to find the answers to four questions: - Is there any damage? - Where in the building is the damage located? - How serious is the damage? - What is the impact of the damage on the building’s future?” One of the various products that have been designed along Masonry textile these lines is a composite seismic wallpaper, which is the winner of the 2010 JEC Award in the Building and Construction category.

embedded textile-mortar composite. Large textile machines were adapted to allow warp-knitting of fibre-optic cables into multiaxial fabrics. The

The composite seismic wallpaper
The composite seismic wallpaper consists of the following components: fibre-optic sensors, multiaxial, warpknitted glass and polymer fibres, nanoparticle-enhanced coatings for the textile fabric, nanoparticle-enhanced mortar to bond the textile to the structure, the structure to be reinforced, and an interrogation system to acquire data from the sensor-

textile fibre material type, orientation and density were optimised for the large forces and complex material behaviour associated with civil infrastructure, masonry, and earthquakes. Multiaxial textile structures are superior in this regard. The textile was then coated for durability and to enhance the textilemortar bond interface. The specific nanoparticle-enhanced polymer coatings for the innovation were produced by the team members. The textiles were then applied to a structure using a mortar compound. This mortar compound was also

No56 April 2010 / jec composites magazine

JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #56 - April 2010

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #56 - April 2010