Keywords: seismic fragility, reinforced concrete precast structures, beam-column connection collapse, two- and three-dimensional modelling, dynamic analysis, Italian building stock, annual collapse probability..

In May 2012 the earthquakes in Northern Italy revealed the seismic vulnerability of typical Italian precast industrial buildings. Nevertheless there are only few fragility models capable of characterizing the seismic behaviour of reinforced concrete (RC) precast structures compared with the large amount of studies on residential buildings. In this paper the vulnerability of such structures was estimated developing fragility curves. An analytical methodology was followed making use of nonlinear dynamic analysis performed on a building stock representative of the existing Italian population to obtain the distribution of buildings in each defined damage states for increasing intensity levels of the seismic action. The consideration of beam-column connection failure, different modelling hypothesis and the differences in the resulting fragility curves when adopting a two- or three-dimensional modelling environment were also analysed. It has been found that the choice of a simplified dynamic analysis that does not consider vertical acceleration could be inadequate for the representation of the connection failure. Therefore a discussion of the sensitivity of the collapse fragility curves to the modelling assumptions is presented. The fragility curves were then applied in the derivation of the annual probability of collapse of RC precast industrial buildings located in Northern and Eastern Tuscany.

purchase the full-text of this paper (price £20)

go to the previous paper
go to the next paper
return to the table of contents
return to the book description
purchase this book (price £65 +P&P)