In Situ Experiment on Retrofit of School Buildings by Adding Composite Columns to Partition Brick Walls

In Situ Experiment on Retrofit of School Buildings by Adding Composite Columns to Partition Brick Walls

Several significantly strong earthquakes occurring over the years incurred tremendous disasters to the buildings of primary schools and middle schools. The 921 Taiwan Chi-chi earthquake was of particular devastating one. According to the statistics, 786 schools(1958 classrooms) were damaged on September 21, 1999. It shows that the lack of seismic performance is a common problem for the existing school buildings in Taiwan. According to the survey data, there exists many common problems in the traditional school buildings, such as a school building being built in different times, wide spacing of lateral reinforcement in the columns, short-column effect due to constraint by windowsills and so on. In addition, most old school buildings focused on getting natural light and ventilation, but overlooked the seismic performance design and lacked quality construction. Therefore, the retrofit of existing school buildings becomes a stringent issue for preventing possible damage in the future. The retrofit technologies used in school buildings include retrofitted with steel jacketing, adding wing wall, adding shear wall, enlarging columns and so on [1-4]. In order to realize the real behavior of a typical school building subjected to lateral load and the benefit of the retrofitted technology, an in situ test for the existing 2-story RC school building was executed in last summer. The retrofit technology by adding composite columns onto the partition brick walls is proposed in this paper, and the composite column itself contributes to the seismic capacity of the school building very well.