Natural fuse-segmentation to arrest failure propagation in precast concrete buildings

Abstract

[EN] The use of precast concrete structures is rapidly increasing worldwide because of their advantages in terms of quality, safety, sustainability, and speed of construction. In the field of progressive collapse of structures, few experimental studies have been carried out to investigate its structural integrity or robustness when subjected to a local initial failure. Previous work by the authors has shown that sufficient structural robustness can be achieved by properly designing the connection detailing between the structural components to withstand a sudden column removal under the accidental load combination defined in the codes. However, some aspects remain open for scientific discussions, such as: ¿What would happen if the initial failures were not limited to the failure of a single column?¿. In such a scenario (multiple column removals or other large initial disturbances), it has been shown that the probability of local collapse propagating to the rest of the structure is significantly higher. This article presents one of the recent tests carried out by the Building Resilient research group of the Universitat Politècnica de València, where a full-scale precast building of 2 storeys (6m) and 3 x 2 spans (15 x 12 m2) has been tested under removal of three columns. The results indicate that the way in which the detailing was provided to the precast elements allowed the system to arrest the failure propagation and limit the collapse extent to a minimum. It can be argued that precast concrete structures naturally have fused connections that take advantage of continuity for small initial failures yet automatically segment the building into individual parts when failure propagation is inevitable.