25-08-2017, 09:32 PM
In spite of numerous advantages of Precast concrete construction, its use in high seismic areas is not popular, mostly because of the low level of confidence in its behaviour in these places. The joints between Precast elements are the critical regions in Precast structures from seismic considerations, as validated by their poor performance in many past earthquakes. Experiments are performed on four exterior beam-column joint sub assemblage specimen. Two of these are Precast and the other two correspond to monolithic ones, which serve as a benchmark for comparison. A pair of monolithic and Precast specimens has a different scheme for the anchorage of beam bars. In Precast specimens, the beam and column bars are anchored together through welding the exposed bars of the components. Displacement-controlled pseudo-static loading is applied on the specimens. The Precast specimen with beam bars anchored into the column performed better than the Precast specimen with continuous U-bars as beam reinforcement. The performance of the former was comparable to the corresponding mono