Energy dissipation characteristics of slab type buildings with special connectors

The latest developments in the construction technologies and the materials facilitated the practicing engineers to go higher and energy-efficient buildings. However, the safety of the buildings and the residents has been an issue all the time. This is not an exception for the precast structures. The advantages of the precast elements are the quality assurance and the rapid erection on the site and challenged by the connection details and their performances during the extreme loading cases such as earthquakes. The utilization of a special mechanical connection of the precast members have been in the focus of the recent works in Istanbul Technical University (ITU-STEELAB). The prototypes of the proposed special connectors, called as cushion, were tested in STEELAB in order to determine the mechanical properties such as lateral and axial stiffness and the failure modes. Once the properties were determined, a hypothetical building of single story multi-bay slab type structure was modeled in the computer framework capable of substituting various parametric values into the model, processing and extracting the results for statistical analysis, SAMA. SAMA is developed based on the use of SAP 2000 OAPI functions called in MATLAB and Python scripts. In the hypothetical model, the cushions were modeled as link elements and placed between all the precast elements including foundation-cladding interface. Extensive non-linear time-history analysis was conducted to identify the damage localization by comparing the energy dissipation at each mechanical connector under ground motion records selected according to focal distance, site conditions and intensity. The preliminary results reveal that the cushions are effectively dissipating a significant amount of energy and mitigating the collapse of the precast elements. The more detailed conclusions will be discussed in the near future.