CO.NA.SE – Seismic Improvement and Static Adaptation

CO.NA.SE Agricultural Cooperative Society has chosen Manini Service as a partner for the static adaptation and seismic improvement of their headquarters in Conselice, in the province of Ravenna.

The company complex is characterized by a strong constructive, technological, and morphological heterogeneity: the buildings, constructed over several successive years, are partly made with prefabricated elements and partly with cast-in-place reinforced concrete. Some structures have shallow foundations, others are founded on piles, and the layout in plan and height is strongly different among the various building units.

Challenging work for Manini Service, called both to consolidate a company where a portion of the buildings showed significant foundation settlement that compromised its static stability, and to improve it seismically, starting from a current state where the connections between the prefabricated reinforced concrete elements were deficient or even missing, as well as to carry out the construction phase during the cooperative’s full activity period.

The intervention was therefore designed in parallel on two fronts: making the working environments safe again and planning the construction site according to CO.NA.SE’s operations, closely linked to the seasonality of harvests, which would have to be carried out within the company.

Construction site planning was a topic discussed with the client from the early stages of the negotiation. CO.NA.SE’s requirements regarding the periods of use of the various portions of the structure were the cornerstone of the entire work programming, with the identification of priorities, indication of the succession of areas to intervene in, coordination of supplies, and workforce management.

The Manini Service design team therefore designed a unitary intervention on the property aimed at static adaptation and seismic improvement of the company complex with the possibility of accessing tax deductions provided for the seismic bonus with a jump of two seismic risk classes; consequently organizing the construction site in functional lots, scheduled to be completed in time to accommodate the storage of goods that would arrive with the production season.

An additional complexity was the planning of work phases with the operations of other companies called to expand the existing plant systems within one of the structures affected by the work.

Strict agreements and mandatory delivery dates, contractually agreed months before the opening of the construction site, were rigorously respected by Manini Service, so much so that it was possible to store goods in the cooperative’s usual operational mode within the rehabilitated buildings, without any modification to CO.NA.SE’s workflow.

Manini Service, thanks to the organization developed in 60 years of activity, was able to totally shape the construction site planning to the Client’s needs. Our business unit, accustomed to working on highly complex structures, could easily organize special safety equipment, scaffolding, aerial platforms to work in very high areas to install devices at height by the workers in full compliance with health and safety regulations for workers throughout the duration of the construction site in the presence of an extremely branched plant system that expanded as our construction site progressed.

Statically consolidating the company complex and improving it seismically first involved resolving the foundation settlement, which compromised the static stability of the affected buildings. In areas with shallow foundations where there were evident signs of settlement, a foundation widening was carried out by constructing a new foundation connected to the existing one, in order to reduce the pressures transmitted by the superstructure to the building’s foundation soil.

The second phase involved intervention on the elevated structure: attention was focused on resolving the crisis mechanisms related to the failure of connections and the excessive deformability of the roof decking, as identified by on-site inspections and numerical analyses conducted. For the panel infills, the size of the supports was increased and tie rods were inserted to control the differential displacement of the pillars while simultaneously functioning as bracing. To connect the floor elements to the beams, tie rods capable of absorbing the deformability of the decks were inserted, anchored at a distance from the building’s perimeter to avoid connection in fragile areas.

A providential intervention for CO.NA.SE, which, after the installation of what Manini Service designed, was severely affected by the flood of May 2023.

Thanks to the adherence to the established timeline, CO.NA.SE had an additional defense to react to the calamity: the structure did not suffer damage to its load-bearing structural elements, as it had been previously secured by Manini Service’s intervention.