Chapter 8: Reinforced Concrete Buildings

Poor seismic performance of reinforced concrete buildings has been demonstrated dramatically in major earthquakes over the past 40 years across the world. This chapters covers a background to reinforced concrete and precast concrete construction, the observed vulnerabilities of reinforced concrete buildings in earthquakes and specific local retrofit techniques for these structures. The chapter attempts to synthesise the available body of literature and provide a broad and practical range of seismic retrofit solutions. This includes both conventional solutions such as reinforced concrete / steel jacketing, infill shear wall strengthening, flat slab strengthening, and also more advanced solutions such as externally applied fibre-reinforced polymers, external post-tensioning, steel haunch and selective weakening.