Experimental Study on a Novel Dry Connection for a Precast Concrete Beam-To-Column Joint

Abstract

At present, precast buildings have become the focus of the building industrialization, and the precast concrete frame structure has been widely used in the construction industry. On this background, a novel precast concrete frame with a bolt connection joint was proposed in this paper. The novel connections include connection steel plates, bolts and rubber layers. To investigate the seismic performance of the precast structure, two full-scale, precast, cruciform, reinforced concrete specimens, and a monolithic counterpart, are tested under reversed cyclic loading. For the precast specimens, two different thickness rubber layers are applied in the connection region, respectively. Seismic behavior was evaluated based on failure mode, hysteretic behavior, stiffness degeneration, ductility and energy dissipation. The results indicated that precast specimens had almost the same ultimate bearing capacity as the cast-in-place ones, and the failure mode is also the same. The precast specimens satisfied the strong column-weak beam design concept. Additionally, the initial stiffness is obviously decreased by adding rubber washers at the joint region, showing a semi-rigid characteristic. At the end of this paper, an equivalent stiffness computation method of the precast joint is discussed.

A Review of Precast Concrete Beam‐to‐Column Connections Subjected to Severe Fire Conditions

“…Researchers have investigated the performance of half-grouted sleeve and welded connection at elevated temperatures [53,56,57], as shown in Table 4. However, thus far, no extensive study has been carried out on the fire behaviour of bearing pads, bolts, and welds [71][72][73][74][75].…”

“…e advantages of bolt connections are their reliability, convenience, and rapid assembly. Bolt connections are often installed together with steel plates and rubber layers [75]. Guo et al [76] asserted that high-strength bolt connections play a critical role in the initial structure stiffness and have considerable influence on the dynamic response of a structure because it is the primary lateral resistance component.…”

“…Bolt connections must be perfect for reducing structural acceleration response. According to Zhong et al [75], precast specimens with bolt connections have almost the same ultimate bearing capacity and failure mode as monolithic cast-in-place specimens.…”

Seismic design of hybrid unbonded post-tensioned precast concrete joints based on bearing capacity and energy dissipation capacity

“…In general, the scholars, from the perspective of imitation, expect the performance of precast beam-column joints can reach or even exceed that of cast-in-situ joints, including bearing capacity, energy dissipation capacity and ductility level. According to the type of the material used, the precast beam-column joints can be divided into joints with regular reinforcement (Xue and Zhang, 2014), joints with profile steel components (Choi et al, 2013), joints with prestressed steel bars or steel strands (Jin et al, 2017(Jin et al, , 2019 and other composite joints (Hu et al, 2020;Zhong et al, 2019). Among them, the prestressed joint does not require for complex construction procedure and long curing period and has satisfactory self-centering capacity, which is coincident with the concept of seismic resilience (Bruneau et al, 2003) promoted in current stage.…”

The Behavior of the Welding Connection Models Between Reinforcing Steel and Steel Plate

“…Zhong, Xiong, Chen, Deng, Chen, and Zhu [5] tested the precast concrete beam-column with the joints located in the beams close to the column surface. This involved welding each of the bottom reinforcement steel of the two beams on a perforated steel plate, after which they were joined using bolts, as shown in Figure 3.…”