Seismic strength of one-story precast building dowel connections

Typical European precast buildings consist of vertical columns joined by pinned horizontal beams. The most spread configuration of dowel connection consists of vertical steel dowels, embedded in the column and passing through or inserted in holes in the beam. It has been shown that this connection failure can be characterized by two different failure modes depending on the concrete cover/dowel diameter ratio. When such a ratio is larger than 5-7, the failure mode involves the yielding of the dowel and the crushing of the concrete around the dowel; in the opposite case, the connection failure is due to the concrete cover splitting in the direction of the load or in the orthogonal direction (side splitting). In this paper, beam-to-column dowel connections are designed according to the Italian seismic building code and the Eurocode 8 general principles, for a set of case-study buildings, considering different geometrical layouts for primary structure and different seismic hazard levels. Different connection configurations are also considered and the connection shear strength is estimated taking into account code and literature formulations, in order to assess their seismic performance