An Experimental Study to Evaluate Performance of Wet Precast Beam Column Connections

Abstract

Precast concrete construction is being adopted worldwide including India during recent past. In precast concrete construction all the components of structures are produced in controlled environment and it is being transported to the site. At site such individual components are connected appropriately. This leads to many advantages like minimizing cast in place concrete, reduced amount of waste, less requirement of formwork, scaffolding and skilled labors, massive production with better quality, faster construction with reduced construction cost etc. All these advantages of precast construction technology makes it most suitable for mass and affordable housing, which is the need for day. But in precast construction, connections are the most critical elements, because in past major collapse of precast structure was taken place because of connection failure. In this study, behavior of two different interior reduced scaled wet precast beam column connection is studied and its performance is compared with their monolithic counterpart. Precast connections are constructed by connecting precast beam and column using RC corbel and steel billet (hollow rectangular section) separately for two different test specimen. Precast beam is cast by using normal cast in place concrete. Some part of beam along the beam length from top face, is kept open to provide continuity by inserting reinforcement bars projecting from column into the stirrups of beam in open area. Then the open spaces from top face of beam and near the connection region is filled with cast in place micro concrete. Performance of specimen is evaluated on the basis of ultimate load carrying capacity, maximum deflection and deflection measured along the length of the beam. From the results, it is observed that precast connections are capable to resist more load as compared to monolithic connection with lesser flexibility.