SEISMIC PERFORMANCE EVALUATION AND RETROFITTING OF REINFORCED CONCRETE STRUCTURES: A COMPREHENSIVE LITERATURE REVIEW

Abstract

The sad fact that damage surveys following all the major earthquakes of the last 30 years have brought back the same dismal statistic, namely, most of the victims and most of the collapses came from reinforced concrete (RC) construction prior to the advent of ductility-based seismic codes. In this paper, the literature is reviewed to understand why it continues to happen, and what engineers have done to address the question. It focuses on the seismic response of RC columns, joints and frames under cyclic lateral loading; development of performance-based earthquake engineering (PBEE) frameworks and associated analysis methods; procedures for seismic fragility and vulnerability assessment; principal retrofitting strategies that have been studied and applied, such as concrete and steel jacketing, fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) composites, base isolation, and supplemental damping devices; and a synthesis of significant advances published during the period 2019 to 2026, including machine learning approaches to seismic response prediction, ultra-high-performance concrete (UHPC) retrofitting, structural health monitoring, post-earthquake damage detection, and updates to international design codes. It is intended to be critical and not encyclopedic; where there are conflicting views on the studies or a technique does not always work and the reasons are not always described in the literature, then these tensions are discussed and not resolved by consensus. This presentation will explore the seismic performance of R/C structures and discuss how R/C structures can be retrofitted using FRP technology, in addition to performance-based earthquake engineering, machine learning, fragility curves, UHPC, and structural health monitoring.