Performance evaluation of a seismic retrofitted R.C. precast industrial building

Recent seismic events occurred in Italy (Emilia-Romagna 2012, Abruzzo 2009) and worldwide (New Zealand 2010 and 2011) highlighted some of the weaknesses of precast concrete industrial buildings, especially those related to the connecting systems traditionally employed to fasten the cladding panels to the internal framing. In fact, one of the most commons fails it is possible to observe in such structural typologies is related to the out-of-plane collapse of the external walls due to the unsatisfactory behaviour of the connectors used to join the panels to the perimeter beams. In this work, the strengthening of a traditional industrial building, assumed as a case study, made by precast reinforced concrete is proposed by the adoption of a dual system allowing the reinforcement of the structure by acting both internally; by pendular columns and, externally, on the walls. In particular, traditional connections at the top of the walls are substituted by devices able to work as a slider with vertical axis while, the bottom of the walls is equipped with two or more hysteretic dampers working on the uplift of the cladding panels occurring under seismic actions. By means of this approach, the structure is stiffened; obtaining a reduction of the lateral drifts under serviceability limit states. In addition, its seismic behaviour is improved due to the additional source of energy dissipation represented by the dampers located at the base of the walls. The effectiveness of the suggested retrofitting approach has been checked by comparing the performance of the retrofitted structure with those of the structure unreinforced by means of both pushover and Incremental Dynamic Analyses (IDA) in terms of behaviour factor, assumed as a measure of the ductility capacity of the structure.