A displacement-based design procedure for dry-assembled precast concrete frames with buckling-restrained braces

Research on precast concrete frames with buckling-restrained braces (BRBs) has predominantly focused on systems requiring in situ concrete placement, while fully dry-assembled precast concrete frames with BRBs (BRB-DPCFs) have received limited attention. This study proposes a displacement-based design procedure tailored for BRB-DPCFs. Key features of the procedure include (1) analogizing BRB-DPCFs to a system with self-centering hysteresis behavior and deriving simplified inter-story capacity curves, and (2) leveraging statistical results of the inelastic displacement ratio for an equivalent single-degree-of-freedom system to estimate inelastic displacement demands. The proposed procedure is validated through push-over and nonlinear dynamic time-history analyses of four BRB-DPCFs with varying building heights. Results show that the maximum story drifts of the designed BRB-DPCFs were slightly below the target values, and a safety margin can be anticipated under the design-based earthquake hazard level. Inelastic damage was confined to expected locations, such as BRBs and the bottom ends of ground-floor precast columns. The proposed design procedure features the potential capacity to ensure excellent post-earthquake reparability for BRB-DPCFs.