An actively controlled prototype for educational buildings

Abstract

The authors address the problem of ameliorating or updating existing educational buildings. This building typology is quite sensitive to social and media pressure, mainly when accidents have occurred nearby. When a building is classified as unsatisfactory, the current code requirements oblige one to re-design the building with significant penalty factors in the resistance values. Often the only solution is to destroy the existing facility and to build a new one. When attempting to preserve the existing building, higher levels of safety are demanded by the society and this can only be achieved by innovative system architectures. The authors propose and discuss a prototype that can be easily adopted to retrofit small educational buildings as the ones common in small municipalities. The higher performance is pursued by a special design of the control scheme, with new control devices and special control laws.