Seismic Retrofit of Industrial Precast Concrete Structures Using Friction Dampers: Case Study from Turkey

This paper presents seismic retrofit of one typical single-story industrial-type precast reinforced concrete building structure located in Turkey using rotational friction dampers. This project consist of retrofitting twelve precast reinforced concrete buildings and it is considered to be the first fully engineered and completed application of supplemental energy dissipation devices for retrofitting purpose in Turkey. In Turkey, precast concrete is one of the most preferred type of construction for all type of industrial structures due to their low cost, fast construction, and availability in rural areas. Unfortunately, most of these structures constructed before "Specification for Buildings to be Built in Seismic Zones (2007) (TEC)" are not well-engineered and are expected to have very poor performance when exposed to a major seismic event. One of the importand official instutions of Turkey decided to undertake a major project to retrofit their single story precast concrete buildings. It is required that buildings will not be vacated during retrofit and disturbance to the building operation will be the minimum. Existing building structures are examined and reviewed in detail, and based on the comparison of several retrofitting schemes, it was concluded that seismic retrofit with energy dissipation devices is a feasible option for the subject buildings. Rotational friction dampers are selected as the supplemental energy dissipation device. ASCE 41-06 is employed for the damper design and performance evaluation. The most effective damper configuration and capacities are selected after an intensive iterative trial-and-error linear study. Finally, nonlinear time-history analyses are performed for seven pairs of historical ground motion acceleration data and it is shown that proposed retrofit scheme satisfies the desired performance goals for both DBE and MCE events. In overall, it is considered that proposed retrofit scheme with dampers provides a viable solution to the stakeholders of the project from performance, design, constructability, and economical points of view. Some application photos were presented and methods are explained in detail in the paper.