No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

The knowledge of the materials’ mechanical properties is a preliminary and important step in the seismic vulnerability assessment of existing buildings. In RC structures, the compressive strength of concrete can have a crucial role on the seismic performance and is usually difficult to estimate. Major seismic codes prescribe that concrete strength has to be determined essentially from in-situ and laboratory tests. In some cases such estimation can be complemented by default values in accordance to standards at the time of construction, therefore analysing the actual concrete properties typically found in RC existing buildings realized in different periods can make available useful data. To this end, in this paper attention has been addressed to public buildings, namely schools and hospitals. A large database made up of about 1500 test results on concrete cores extracted from about 300 RC public buildings located in Basilicata region (Italy), has been prepared and analysed. The relationships between the actual strength values (mean and dispersion) and the construction period of buildings have been studied. Theoretical distributions to approximate the discrete distributions of strength values in different construction periods have been determined, thus providing relevant data for the structural assessment of individual buildings and, especially, for large scale vulnerability evaluations.

Reliable assessment procedures of existing RC buildings are currently available, and have been introduced in the Italian and European codes reporting new rules for seismic analysis. However, further studies are required in order to further improve such procedures and, specifically, obtain more accurate data on the behavior of beam-column joints, whose role on the global behavior of framed RC buildings can be crucial. Until now studies on this issue have been mainly devoted to joint specimens with stiff beams, however frame structures having wide (also called flexible or flat) beams are widely used in the European residential building stock. To this purpose, given the lack of knowledge, an experimental investigation on full scale beam-column joints with wide beam has been planned and is currently in progress. In the present paper the main results of three tests are reported and discussed. The role of different earthquake resistant design levels on joint performances is pointed out.