Sustainable, advanced and economical retrofitting strategies for reducing the seismic vulnerability and risk of steel storage pallet racks

Marco Simoncelli

A sustainable strategy to reduce the seismic vulnerability of steel storage pallet racks is to increase the life cycle and the lifetime of the existing stock of racks. This will aid in reducing economic and environmental impact of new constructions but also avoiding downtime in logistics, which may cause high direct and indirect economic loss (e.g. cost of dismantling and replacement or downtime/business interruption along with issues for workers). The SAVERACK project responds to this need by delivering innovative retrofitting strategies that will be used to enhance the seismic performance of existing racks. Different approaches and devices, aimed at improving the strength and ductility of the connections (longitudinal direction) and of the upright frame (cross-aisle direction) will be developed and investigated. The proof-of-concept for such devices will start with the selection of case-study rack configurations, after which several prototypes of the devices will be developed and characterised to define their behaviour and performance. The next phase of the project will foresee the integration of the different developed devices in the racks themselves. At the same time, an extensive numerical modelling campaign of the dynamic behaviour of the selected racks, with and without the different devices will assure the extension of the experimental outcomes to additional configurations.The final step of SAVERACK will include the experimental testing of the rack configurations (with and without the device) on a newgeneration shake table, thereby simulating real earthquake inputs to effectively gauge the improvement given by the devices 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, SAVERACK will propose guidelines to assist stakeholders in producing and correctly employing the devices in current practice.