ENHANCEMENT OF SEISMIC PERFORMANCE FOR REINFORCED CONCRETE STRUCTURES

civil

In many places around the world, Reinforced Concrete (RC) structures are designed using codes that are now not providing adequate safety under seismic action. Such gravity load-designed RC buildings generally fail to provide the required seismic demand and suffer extensive damage leading to a partial or complete collapse of the buildings as observed in several past earthquakes around the world. Providing life safety is the first priority in the earthquake resistant design. Due to the rise of performance-based design, the researchers have started to focus on decreasing the damage in the building and minimizing the costs for repairing and replacement in the mild seismic events. The structural and non- structural components of a building is subjected to seismic forces that must have adequate strength and stiffness to minimize the inter-storey drift during structural excitations. In the present study, lateral resisting system, i.e. the Link Column Frame (LCF) system, for the reinforced concrete structures was investigated. This system consists of link beams which are intended to yield in shear placed between closely spaced dual columns and an adjacent flexible moment resisting frame in which the beam is restrained at one end and hinged at another end. A seismic strengthening technique using a concrete link beam as an energy-dissipating device is proposed to enhance the lateral strength, the lateral stiffness, and the energy-dissipation potential of a deficient RC frame. The links act as a structural fuse which sacrifices itself by yielding to provide ductility, energy dissipation, and nonlinear softening behaviour while limiting the relative damage and inelastic behaviour of the structural members of the nearby moment frame.

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