Carlos Chastre

Precast concrete sandwich panels started being used as cladding for buildings, together with the rise of industrial prefabrication, during the mid-20th century. Since then, society and industry have become increasingly aware of energy efficiency in all fields, for both affordability and sustainability consciousness. As such, buildings have been subject to increasingly stringent requirements with the technology of sandwich panels kept continually at the forefront.
Nowadays, sandwich panels have reached the highest standards of functional performance as structural efficiency, flexibility in use, the speed as well as of aesthetic appeal. These combine in building construction with the well-known advantages of prefabrication; such as construction, quality consciousness, durability and sustainability. Sandwich panels have gained more and more important in their field, thus representing quite a significant application within the industry of prefabrication and an important share of the market.
The Commission ‘Prefabrication’ is keen to promote the development of all precast structural concrete products and to transfer the knowledge to practical design and construction. Now filling a strategic gap, by issuing this Guide to Good Practice, which includes design considerations, structural analysis, building physics, use of materials, manufacturing methods, equipment, field performance, and provides a comprehensive overview of the information currently available worldwide. The Commission is particularly proud that this document is a result of close cooperation with PCI and that it will be published by both fib and PCI. This cooperation started six years ago, first with comparing the different approaches to several issues, then progressively integrating up to producing common documents, like this one, that wasn’t yet treated in a specific Guide by either body.

This document has a broad scope and is not focussed on design issues. Precast construction under seismic conditions is treated as a whole. The main principles of seismic design of different structural systems, their behavior and their construction techniques are presented through rules, construction steps and sequences, procedures, and details that should lead to precast structures built in seismic areas complying with the fundamental performance requirements of collapse prevention and life safety in major earthquakes and limited damage in more frequent earthquakes.The content of this document is largely limited to conventional precast construction and, although some information is provided on the well-known “PRESSS technology” (jointed ductile dry connections), this latter solution is not treated in detail in this document.The general overview, contained in this document, of alternative structural systems and connection solutions available to achieve desired performance levels, intends to provide engineers, architects, clients, and end-users (in general) with a better appreciation of the wide range of applications that modern precast concrete technology can have in various types of construction from industrial to commercial as well as residential. Lastly, the emphasis on practical aspects, from conceptual design to connection detailing, aims to help engineers to move away from the habit of blindly following prescriptive codes in their design, but instead go back to basic principles, in order to achieve a more robust understanding, and thus control, of the seismic behaviour of the structural system as a whole, as well as of its components and individual connections.

A ligação pilar-fundação tem um papel fundamental no comportamento das estruturas pré-fabricadas, em particular, na presença de acções horizontais, como a acção dos sismos e do vento, que introduzem esforços elevados na base dos pilares. Um dos sistemas de ligação pilar-fundação usados em estruturas pré-fabricadas consiste em deixar na extremidade inferior dos pilares armaduras salientes que são introduzidas em negativos executados nas fundações. Estes negativos são posteriormente injectados com grout para garantir a ligação. No presente trabalho foram estudadas diferentes soluções de negativos para ligação das armaduras do pilar à fundação, tendo sido realizados ensaios monotónicos para analisar o seu comportamento. Nesta comunicação apresentam-se e discutem-se os resultados obtidos da análise experimental efectuada.

A ligação pilar-fundação tem um papel fundamental no comportamento das estruturas pré-fabricadas,
em particular, na presença de acções horizontais, como a acção dos sismos e do vento. Um dos sistemas de ligação pilar-fundação usados em estruturas pré-fabricadas consiste em deixar na extremidade inferior dos pilares armaduras salientes que são introduzidas em negativos executados nas fundações, sejam elas sapatas ou maciços de encabeçamento de estacas. Estes negativos são posteriormente injectados com “grout” para garantir a ligação. Foram estudados diferentes soluções de negativos para ligação das armaduras do pilar na fundação. Foram realizados ensaios monotónicos e cíclicos, para analisar não só o comportamento às acções estáticas mas também para a acção sísmica. No presente trabalho apresentam-se os resultados obtidos com a análise experimental efectuada. O estudo realizado permite apresentar recomendações para projecto e quais os tipos de ligações com melhor desempenho.

Polymeric mortars or concrete are special building materials which can be used to repair or strengthen localized areas of structural elements. Following research on the behaviour of retrofitting reinforced concrete circular columns with FRP composite materials and bearing in mind the high strength of polymer concretes, it was decided to develop a solution to seismic retrofit of reinforced concrete columns with polymer concrete. The mechanical characteristics of different polymer concretes and especially their performance when subjected to cyclic axial compression, several bending tests, and monotonic and cyclic axial compression tests were studied, namely the compressive strength, the tensile strength on bending and the Young's modulus. Columns were also tested under axial compression and cyclic horizontal loads. The results of these tests are shown and interpreted. It is concluded that the improved behaviour in monotonic compression of polymer concrete is essentially associated with better strength characteristics of resin, whereas its superior behaviour under cyclic loading is linked to a smoother aggregate grading curve.

Structural design relies essentially on tests made on cylinders of small size to estimate the probability of failure of prototype members, since full-scale testing of structures to determine their strength is not feasible. The confidence that such scale modeling deserves in terms of representation of actual behavior needs careful examination, due to such factors as material nonlinearities, difficulties of scale representation of particulate materials, and sometimes the impossibility of simultaneously satisfying independent dimensionless parameters. Some failures explained by linear fracture mechanics are associable with strong size effects, as opposed to the cases where small cracks are a material property. Besides research centered on these problems, a number of studies of scale effects have been associated with the increased probability of finding a flaw in larger objects. In fact, geometric similitude may coexist with microscopic randomness of flaws that cause size effects to appear. The type of material of the object under study may also be a decisive factor. For example, scatter of the mechanical properties in unidirectional fiber-reinforced polymers (FRPs) is much larger than in metals due to a larger density of flaws. Thus the strength of FRP laminates may depend on the volume of material involved. Strengthening reinforced concrete columns with FRP wraps leads to new constitutive laws for the overall response of the columns and requires small-scale testing followed by extrapolation for design use. The present paper focuses on the difficulties of this step, based on the experimental data obtained. The questions mentioned above are addressed, and the relevance of the adequate representation of the lateral stiffness of the FRP jacket in the scaled cylinders is emphasized. The paper also addresses the problem of testing confined cylinders with a given slenderness ratio H/D=height/diameter, within the range usually characteristic of short columns, and extrapolating the results for columns of different H/D. The importance of the parameter (thickness of jacket/diameter of column, representative of stiffness of jacket/stiffness of concrete core) is also examined. The influence of the parameter is shown to be relatively minor, whereas the nonscaling of the relative stiffness of the core and jacket would be a major cause of error. The experimental data, in terms of strain and strength, are also compared with numerical models proposed in the literature, and the quality of the approximations is analyzed.

The seismic retrofit of reinforced concrete columns with FRP jackets has received a considerable increment in recent years due the high strength-weight and stiffness-weight ratios of FRP compared to other materials. The FRP outer shell also contributes to prevent or delay environmental degradation of the concrete and corrosion of the steel reinforcement. An experimental program conducted in order to analyze the behavior of reinforced concrete columns jacketed with FRP composites or repaired with polymeric concrete and subjected to axial compression and cyclic horizontal loads is described. The dimensions of the cylindrical columns were 1500 mm height by 250 mm diameter. The influence of various parameters on the response, including the type of confining material and the number of FRP layers, is reported. The results of the tests are shown and interpreted.