STUDY ON THE BEHAVIOUR OF A VIERENDEEL REINFORCED CONCRETE COLUMN UNDER SEISMIC ACTIONS Elena Tulei, Dan Cretu, Andrei

Pricopie Generally, single-storey industrial structures built in Romania before 1989 were made from Vierendeel reinforced concrete columns and steel or reinforced concrete roof trusses. In the last 50 years, hazard levels continuously grew in the Romanian seismic codes, making necessary the asses of the safety ratio of existing buildings in order to provide strengthening measures. The paper presents the study on the behaviour of a Vierendeel concrete column from a single-storey industrial structure from Bucharest, designed and built in 1979, two years after the severe earthquake from Vrancea, March 4, 1977. By changing the destination of the building from industrial to commercial use, its importance class changes, implying an increase by 20% of the dynamic amplification factor. In the same time, the site peak ground acceleration changed from 0.2g according to the Romanian seismic code P100-1978 to 0.24g according to the new code P100-2006 and to 0.3g according to the last code, P100-2011. The new codes also increased the performance demands. Consequently, the structure behaviour has to be analyzed in accordance to its new destination and loads. The present state of the reinforced concrete members of the building, which suffered some moderate damages after the Vrancea earthquakes from august 1986 and May 1990, is shown in the paper. Nonlinear incremental dynamic analyses are done considering recorded and generated accelerograms specific to the seismic conditions of Bucharest. A probabilistic analysis of the results is done in order to find the performance levels of the existing structure. The results of the nonlinear dynamic analyses are compared with the nonlinear static analysis results. The increasing of the seismic forces imposed strengthening measures, namely the filling up of the holes of the Viereendel columns, as well as making a r.c. jacket for some perimeter columns. The bending and shear resistance and the ductility of the columns is thus increased. In the end, some remarks are made regarding the seismic safety of existing buildings similar to the one subject to this study. single-storey r. c. structure, nonlinear analyses, seismic performance