The New Tocumen International Airport South Terminal in Panama City, Panama

This paper provides a brief description of the structural and seismic design of the new Tocumen International Airport south terminal, currently under construction in Panama City, Panama. With a gross area of 860,000 sq ft (80,000 m²), the new terminal has a curvilinear shape 2,164 ft (660 m) long by up to 531 ft (162 m) wide on plan and is classified as an essential facility. Foster + Partners adopted the state-of-the-art performance-based seismic structural design methodology, incorporating nonlinear static pushover and nonlinear response history analysis methods. The roof is one of the primary design features of the new terminal. Framed in structural steel and supported on reinforced concrete columns, it comprises curved plate girders spanning up to 151 ft (46 m) between tubular girders that are faceted on plan and on elevation along the curved perimeter. Beneath the roof the seismic force-resisting systems include reinforced concrete moment frames and shear walls. Following capacity design principles and with innovative reinforcement detailing, the tops of the reinforced concrete roof columns are carefully designed to act as ductile fuses. The fuses limit the maximum seismic demand that can be transferred to the steel roof, which is designed to remain essentially elastic under MCE shaking.