Reflecting the historic first European seismic code, this professional book focuses on seismic design, assessment and retrofitting of concrete buildings, with thorough reference to, and application of, EN-Eurocode 8. Following the publication of EN-Eurocode 8 in 2004-05, 30 countries are now introducing this European standard for seismic design, for application in parallel with existing national standards (till March 2010) and exclusively after that. Eurocode 8 is also expected to influence standards in countries outside Europe, or at the least, to be applied there for important...

Nowadays research in earthquake engineering is mainly experimental and in large-scale; advanced computations are integrated with large-scale experiments, to complement them and extend their scope, even by coupling two different but simultaneous tests. Earthquake engineering cannot give answers by testing and qualifying few, small typical components or single large prototypes. Besides, the large diversity of Civil Engineering structures does not allow drawing conclusions from only a few tests; structures are large and their seismic response and performance cannot be meaningfully tested in...