Shake Table Tests on Retrofit of School Buildings by Adding Composite Column to Partition Brick Walls

Shake Table Tests on Retrofit of School Buildings by Adding Composite Column to Partition Brick Walls

Thousands of buildings were damaged by the devastating 921 Chi-Chi earthquake. School buildings are the most vulnerable category in public buildings and the retrofit of existing school buildings becomes a stringent issue. Therefore, the retrofit of school buildings by adding composite columns onto the partition brick walls was proposed. In this paper, the proposed method was verified dynamically and experimentally through shake table tests. Three full-scale one-story reinforced concrete models were designed and fabricated. One was a bench mark model with in-filled brick walls. After a series of tests, the bench model was repaired by the proposed method and it was named as the second model. The third model was a retrofitted one. All the models were subjected to a series of shake table tests in the direction along the corridor that is the out-of-plane direction of the brick walls. According to the experimental results, the maximum base shear of the model with seismic repair was recovered from the damage to 100% of that of the bench mark model. The maximum base shear of the model with seismic retrofit was 125% of that of the bench mark model. The feasibility of the proposed retrofit method was successfully verified.