1st Croatian Conference on Earthquake Engineering 1CroCEE 2021

The continuous increase in population coupled with migration towards urban areas put pressure on the building stock and increased the demand for housing and office buildings. Some of the most densely populated regions are located in areas prone to natural disasters out of which earthquakes are of particular interest for designers and researchers in the field of civil engineering because of their consequences in terms of human casualties, property and economic losses. There are several approaches to mitigate such losses and experimental investigations on the behaviour of different structural systems to seismic excitations is an indispensable tool, albeit it being, sometimes, an expensive one. Most often this represents a significant obstacle in advancing the knowledge in the field due to the lack of experimental data documenting the realistic dynamic responses of structures tested under real or artificial seismic loads.
The paper presents a comprehensive overview of the experimental investigations on the seismic behaviour of several structural systems by means of shake-table tests conducted at the Technical University “Gheorghe Asachi” of Iasi in the general context of the state of the art in the field. The experiments highlighted the importance of such investigation methods in understanding the behaviour of real buildings subjected to earthquake loads. The obtained results could also serve as calibration data for the numerical models that may be used to explore a wide range of varying parameters.