Pushover Analyses of Precast Structural Wall Buildings

In this paper the behavior of precast RC buildings, whose structure includes frames, made of beams and columns, and walls, supporting all lateral seismic actions acting on the building, is investigated. It is well known that the performance under seismic excitation of buildings in which the resisting elements consist of walls is good. One of the main advantages in the design of wall structural buildings is that columns, accordingly to Eurocode 81, may be considered as "secondary structural elements" regarding the building response to seismic loads. As a consequence the transverse cross section dimensions of columns results smaller than those to be used for moment resisting frame buildings. Furthermore, the capacity design of structural wall buildings can be easily applied being that precast beams can be usually considered as simply supported on columns, that means that walls may be schematized as cantilever linked to truss elements with zero moment capacity. In the paper, a multi-store...