Seismic assessment of existing precast RC industrial buildings in Portugal

Abstract

Precast reinforced concrete (PRC) buildings are common on European industrial parks. In past earthquakes, namely in Italy and Turkey, this typology of buildings showed a poor performance, namely at structural level. One of the major concerns at structural level regards the connection between the beams and columns. Two types of beam-to-column connections are more common in this type of buildings: the pure friction and a mechanical one including steel dowels. The seismic performance of six existent Portuguese PRC buildings built with these two solutions are analyzed considering nonlinear static and dynamic analyses addressing both global (columns) and local (connections) response parameters. The seismic assessment in view of the regulation for existing buildings (Eurocode 8 –Part 3) showed that, overall, this typology of buildings, present an acceptable structural performance. Nonetheless, unsatisfactory performance was observed at the beam-to-column connection in one of the buildings built without steel dowels. In terms of non-structural performance, namely in terms of the cladding elements, a poor performance is foreseen, for regions of moderate to high seismic action, regardless of the period of construction of the building.