A Practice-Oriented Procedure for Seismic Reliability Assessment of RC Structures Affected by Carbonation-Induced Degradation

Abstract

Existing reinforced concrete (RC) buildings in Europe have generally been designed without proper consideration of seismic actions and capacity design principles, and thus they tend to be vulnerable to earthquakes. Moreover, since a significant proportion of the aforementioned buildings were developed during the 1950s and 1960s, they are currently close to the end of their service life. Therefore, seismic assessment of existing RC building is a major issue in structural engineering and construction management, and the related seismic analyses should take into account the effect of material ageing and degradation. This paper proposes a practice-oriented procedure for quantifying seismic reliability, taking into account the main effects of carbonation-induced degradation phenomena. It summarizes the main aspects of the most up-to-date models for the seismic degradation of concrete and RC members and shows how nonlinear static (pushover) analyses can be utilized (in lieu of the most time-consuming non-linear time history analyses) in quantifying seismic reliability with respect to the performance levels of relevance in seismic engineering. A relevant case study is finally considered with the aim to showing how some parameters, such as exposure class and cover thickness, affect the resulting seismic reliability of existing RC buildings.