Displacement based design for precast concrete frames with not-emulative connections

The Displacement Based Design (DBD) methodology for precast concrete frame structures with not-emulative connections is investigated herein. The seismic design procedure is applied to both single-storey and multi-storey structures. Industrial and office buildings, warehouses and commercial malls with a structural layout typical of the European market are considered: cantilever columns resting on isolated footings connected at the floor level to pre-stressed precast beams, supporting pre-stressed precast concrete floor or roof elements. The need to control the lateral seismic displacement is dictated by the high flexibility of these structures, which in turn is associated to the structural scheme and to the inter-storey height. Starting from the general displacement based design procedure, the paper focuses on how properly taking into account the influence of column-to-foundation and beam-to-column precast connections; expressions and procedures are developed to determine the yield curvature, the equivalent viscous damping, the effective height and the effective mass of the single degree of freedom substitute structure adopted in the DBD procedure. The proposed procedure is applied to selected case studies and validated through non-linear time history analyses, showing the ability of the design procedure in controlling lateral displacements.