Determinación de zonas menos vulnerables en el edificio de la Facultad de Psicología de la Universidad de Cuenca ante un evento sísmico

Abstract

Ecuador is a country with high seismic risk due to its geographical location and has an important history of earthquakes of great magnitude in most of its territory, one of the cities with potential affectation is Cuenca that has a high seismic threat and vulnerability in its buildings. To mitigate the risks that a building can have, there are vulnerability assessments developed with different methods ranging from analyzing qualitative aspects of buildings before a disaster, generating statistics by observing damage after a catastrophe, to performing numerical methods in which possible damages are quantified with the help of simulations through the use of software specialized in this subject. The importance of these vulnerability assessments lies in the fact that through their realization contingency plans can be generated that allow the occupants of a building to know how to act in the face of a disaster and thus contribute to preserving lives and material goods. The present work aims to analyze the vulnerability of the building of the Faculty of Psychology of the University of Cuenca to locate the most and least vulnerable areas through a methodological line that contemplates the structural and architectural survey of the building to know its physical and geometric characteristics, the elaboration of a three-dimensional mathematical model that simulates the movement of the building in case of earthquake using the method of elements finite through the use of software such as MATLAB, Stabil, SAP2000, among others and finally the analysis of results that allows to obtain conclusions about the behavior and operation of the building