In situ seismic testing of a reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete building

Abstract

Autoclaved aerated concrete (AAC) reinforced panels are used to construct easily erected, energy efficient, low-rise prefabricated buildings. This study aims to contribute to the understanding of the seismic response of reinforced-AAC-wall-panel buildings. For this purpose, a full-scale two-story building constructed on a building site by using reinforced AAC panels was tested under two-way cyclic displacement excursions up to near collapse. The test results showed that the test building had a lateral load capacity of 1.6 times its weight with a global displacement ductility of about 3.5. The first story of the building sustained significant damage due to the rocking of the building followed by panel crushing. The slab-wall connections did not sustain any damage during the test. Afterward, numerical models of AAC panels were calibrated by using component test results from the literature. Nonlinear static analysis was conducted on the test building by using the proposed modeling approach. A reasonably good agreement was observed between the test results and numerical model estimations both for the envelope and the cyclic response. Finally, incremental dynamic analyses were conducted on the test building in order to observe the response of the building under severe earthquake motions. The dynamic analyses results showed that AAC buildings are expected to behave in their pre-yielding regions under design earthquakes. Furthermore, the reserved ductility and available over strength can enable AAC buildings survive the maximum considered earthquakes without collapse. K E Y W O R D S design, drift, in situ testing, reinforced wall panel, seismic 1 GENERAL Autoclaved aerated concrete (AAC) emerged as a construction material in the beginning of the 20th century and AAC took its modern form in 1923 after the development of the industrialized autoclaving process (or pressurized steam curing) as explained by Eriksson [1]. Subsequently, reinforced AAC elements in the form of wall/slab panels were produced in 1935 [2]. AAC, with its porous cellular structure, became popular in the construction industry within a short period of time due to its advantages such as being light weight, good insulator [3,4], fire resistant [5,6], environmentally friendly [7]. AAC, being produced in a factory-controlled environment with precise production details allows to minimize the construction errors while increasing the speed of erection. Upon using reinforcement with this engineered material, load carrying capacity and ductility can be increased efficiently to allow its use as load bearing members in walls and slabs. Recent needs on sustainable resilient and energy efficient housing can easily be addressed by using AAC as a prefabricated building system. In this regard, seismic safety and estimation of the expected performance of AAC low-rise buildings are extremely important for countries located in seismic zones. The mechanical properties of AAC were investigated by determining the compressive strength, tensile strength, split tensile streng...

The Particle Filter and Extended Kalman Filter methods for the structural system identification considering various uncertainties

“…Hence, the selection of this range for the particles defined based on previous studies [41,44,51,54], is of crucial importance. In the PF method, 500 particles are selected and modified during the time steps using the method of the aforementioned algorithm.…”