Marmara University Training and Research Hospital

Istanbul expects a devastating major earthquake in the future. The majority of the building stock of the city has been built with the old seismic design practice. The need for emergency hospitals in service after such earthquakes is inevitable.

Marmara University Training and Research Hospital, one of the biggest health facilities in Anatolian side of Istanbul, has been retrofitted with the seismic base isolation technique to serve even during an earthquake and is going to make history in the earthquake engineering field worldwide. The retrofitting works have been completed on January, 2016.

The existing hospital is located in the Anatolian part of the city on the coast of Marmara Sea. It was built in 1991. The hospital consists of 16 adjacent blocks and an indoor parking lot.

The hospital, which is designed to respond to modern needs as well as retrofitting against earthquakes, were redesigned without being attached to old projects.

Serving 10.000 patients in a day, Marmara University Training and Research Hospital has a 112.400 sqm construction yard consists of 16 complexes and a closed garage. The existing number of hospital beds (600) increased up to 720 with the ones in the departments.

Prota performed renovation designs (for updating the hospital standards to current state architectural, electrical, mechanical and hospital services) as well as seismic structural design with base isolation system including technical specifications and cost estimation within the scope of the project.

Prota provided seismic structural designs with base isolation (to comply with the Turkish Earthquake and Building code requirements for earthquake performance safety and FEMA) design. Procurement of base isolators and installation were also supervised by Prota.

The hospital is located in the 1st seismic zone according to the Turkish seismic code. The hospital will have a major role during the possible Istanbul earthquake by means of seismic isolation technology. Within this method, the isolation is placed under the columns and the concrete partition in the appropriate floor to cut the direct interaction with the floor. Moving with the lateral pressure, the isolators make very soft but big swings and this absorbs the earthquake’s energy, thus the destructive affect doesn’t damage the elements of the upper load-bearing system.

All column, beam and shear wall elements were modeled as elastic frame elements while isolators were idealized by elastic link elements. More than 800 earthquake isolators were used to minimize any potential earthquake risks.