| Ductility and energy dissipation are two important properties of columns when being part of a structure placed in moderate/high seismic regions like the East of Canada, being Montreal the second place in seismic risk in the country. These properties are directly related to the seismic performance of a structure. The reduction in cost of maintenance is also an important issue for the buildings owners, who have the obligation to warrant the security of the occupants and users of the infrastructures. The synthetic fiber reinforced concrete (SNFRC) seems to be a good material that fill up these characteristics, but its utilisation is actually restrained to non structural elements or structural but non principal elements. Therefore, to extend its application to the structural field, data must be collected for the development of models and seismic design requirements of columns made from SNFRC. Six large-scale circular columns were tested under constant axial load (25% de Agf'c ) and cyclic flexure to study their seismic performance. Three columns were made from normal reinforced concrete (NRC) and the three others from SNFRC having all of them a concrete strength of 30 MPa. The volumetric ratio of synthetic fibers in polypropylene-polyethylene was 1%. Three specimens of NRC having a spiral pitch of 100, 75 and 42 mm were compared with three similar columns made from SNFRC. The results show that the presence of fibers into the concrete matrix helps to improve the ductile behavior and energy dissipation capacity of the columns. This improvement, however, was found not to be proportional to the amount of confinement steel. Reduction in the confinement steel seems to be possible when SNFRC is used, and even a better behavior was obtained.;Keywords. seismic behavior, circular columns, normal-strength concrete, fiber-reinforced concrete (FRC), synthetic fiber-reinforced concrete (SNFRC), ductility, energy dissipation... |
