The influence of dowel-pin connections on the seismic fragility assessment of RC precast industrial buildings

Background: Recent major earthquakes in the centre of the Italy, between August and October 2016, have reaffirmed the seismic vulnerability of precast industrial buildings with a lot of collapse recorded. This is typical due to the past Italian building practices, where structural deficiencies are mainly related to the capacity to transfer horizontal forces between primary structural elements. Objectives and Methods: In these types of structures, a key role is played by the dowel pin connections which allow to transfer lateral horizontal forces from the beam to the column, without losing load carrying capacity. For this reason, in this work, the assessment of the seismic fragility of single-story reinforced concrete precast building located not far from the epicentres of the two aforementioned earthquakes was done. Results and Conclusion: The seismic risk was evaluated in terms of annual frequency of exceedance for three performance levels provided by the European and Italian seismic codes, considering the mean hazard curves for the site. The comparison between the fragility of different structural models shows the importance in the choice of the column-beam connection modelling to obtain reliable results on the structural safety assessment.