Repairing and Seismic Strengthening of Damaged Reinforced Concrete Structures with External Steel Shear Walls

Abstract

In this study, a new strengthening technique for earthquake-damaged reinforced concrete (RC) structures was experimentally investigated. Within the scope of the study, three-dimensional, two-storey RC model was constructed. During the production of this model, some of the common structural inadequacies in existing RC structures were taken into consideration. For this purpose, initially a reference model was exposed to lateral loads up to 1.7 % drift. Then, the damaged structure was repaired with epoxy injection. Finally, the repaired model was strengthened with External Steel Shear Walls (ESSW) and subsequently tested under the same load pattern. Chevron braced system is selected as ESSW. The results show that existing RC structures damaged under earthquake effects can be strengthened rapidly by proposed strengthening technique and the lateral load capacity and stiffness of these structures can be increased significantly.