Design and modelling of traditional and dissipative techniques for seismic rehabilitation of precast industrial buildings

Seismic rehabilitation of precast concrete structures is today implemented with both traditional and innovative, dissipation-based solutions. The relative scarcity of available works focussing on dissipative bracing systems, especially those equipped with external dissipaters, motivated this research, whose main goal is to analyse an innovative technique comprising dissipative steel braces embedding sacrificial elements, coupled with a friction rotation damper for beam-to-column connections. Both devices can be replaced after a seismic event and put in place by dry installation. With reference to a single-storey precast building, representative of the Italian construction period of the ‘70s and hypothetically located in three Italian cities characterised by increasing levels of seismic hazard, the proposed solution was compared with two traditional rehabilitation techniques, featuring low and high invasiveness, respectively. After addressing the retrofit design phase, nonlinear three-dimensional models of three variants of the building in their unretrofitted and retrofitted configurations were created in OpenSees and subjected to nonlinear static and dynamic analyses. The latter were carried out within a multiple-stripe analysis framework. The comparative evaluation, undertaken in terms of pushover curves and demand-over-capacity ratio median curves for two limit states, provided reassurance on the efficacy of the proposed dissipation-based strategy, as well as the more invasive traditional solution, in effectively improving the seismic response of this construction system.