Shake-Table Tests of a Pile-Supported Low-Rise Reinforced Concrete Building Designed to Japanese Building Standards
Publication: Journal of Structural Engineering
Volume 148, Issue 9
Abstract
In Japanese engineering practice, pile foundations are designed to lower base shear demands below that considered in the superstructure’s design. In recent earthquakes, such buildings incurred significant pile damage even in cases where the superstructure only had minor damage. This study looks to replicate this failure mechanism via large-scale shake-table tests of a pile-supported building designed following Japanese practice, compare its performance against a fixed-base case, and identify issues with such buildings. The specimen was a 40%-scaled 3-story reinforced concrete frame building supported on weak piles buried in soil. After completing shake-table testing of the pile-supported specimen, the specimen’s foundation was fixed directly to the soil tank to mimic a fixed-base condition, and further excitations were applied. For the pile-supported case, the piles underwent drift ratio demands of up to 14% and suffered local collapse failure at 1.0–1.5 times the design shaking intensity, whereas the superstructure only had a drift ratio of 0.17% and minor damage. These observations were consistent with postearthquake damage assessments, demonstrating that the shake-table tests were able to replicate realistic failure mechanisms. For the fixed-base case, the superstructure was able to withstand demands equivalent to 1.7–2.5 times the Japanese design spectra before reaching 2.0% drift and did not exhibit any strength degradation. Based on these results, buildings with weak piles will likely suffer significant failure at smaller intensity events than that which the superstructure would have been able to withstand. Furthermore, the lack of superstructure damage for such cases may lead to significant pile failure being unidentified during postearthquake inspections, resulting in unsafe buildings being occupied.
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Data Availability Statement
Some or all data, models, or code that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to acknowledge that some of the pile-supported building results had been previously published in Japanese in the Journal of Structural and Construction Engineering (Yamazoe et al. 2018). Considering the importance of the results, the authors view that the work should be shared in English. Furthermore, comparison with fixed-base results and discussions are newly presented in this paper.
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Published In
Journal of Structural Engineering
Volume 148 • Issue 9 • September 2022
Copyright
© 2022 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jun 24, 2020
Accepted: Mar 2, 2022
Published online: Jun 24, 2022
Published in print: Sep 1, 2022
Discussion open until: Nov 24, 2022
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