Seismic Performance of Substandard RC Columns Retrofitted with Sprayed GFRM

There is a myriad amount of substandard reinforced concrete (RC) buildings in developing countries that do not comply with the requirements and instructions of the current building design codes. In particular, columns in these substandard buildings demonstrate unsatisfactory and undesired behavior against lateral loads, mainly due to low concrete compressive strength and poor reinforcement detailing. The problem is exacerbated when the axial load ratio (ratio of applied axial load to the axial load capacity) and/or the shear ratio (ratio of shear force corresponding to moment capacity (V_e) to the shear capacity (V_r)) is/are high, leading to brittle failure modes. In this study, three full-scale substandard RC columns subjected to high axial load ratio of 0.75 were tested under constant axial load combined with reversed cyclic lateral displacements. Shear ratio (V_e/V_r) of the substandard columns were 0.75 and 0.82 according to ACI 318-19 (ACI 318 (2019) Building Code Requirements for Structural Concrete. American Concrete Institute, Farmington Hills, MI, USA) and (Turkish Building Earthquake Code (Turkish Building Earthquake Code (TBEC) (2018) Disaster & Emergency Management Authority, Ankara, Turkey), respectively. According to the TBEC (Turkish Building Earthquake Code (TBEC) (2018) Disaster & Emergency Management Authority, Ankara, Turkey), columns had a high V_e/(f_ctmbd) ratio of 1.12, where, f_ctm, b, and d are the direct tensile strength of concrete, width of the cross-section, and effective depth of the section. The ratio of transverse reinforcement to minimum required transverse reinforcement according to the ACI 318-19 (ACI 318 (2019) Building Code Requirements for Structural Concrete. American Concrete Institute, Farmington Hills, MI, USA) and TBEC (Turkish Building Earthquake Code (TBEC) (2018) Disaster & Emergency Management Authority, Ankara, Turkey) was 0.19 and 0.77, respectively. Two of the columns were retrofitted with an innovative, cost-effective, and easily-applicable strengthening method, through external jacketing with sprayed glass fiber reinforced mortar (GFRM) of different characteristics. The remaining column was tested as the reference specimen to evaluate the efficiency of the strengthening method. The test results demonstrated the extremely poor performance of the reference substandard column as well as the remarkable lateral load capacity and ductility improvement provided by the adopted novel strengthening approach.