Enhancement of Beam-Column Joint by RC Jacketing

In low to moderate seismicity regions, reinforced concrete buildings are designed to resist dead and live loads only. This results in joint cores with reinforcement detail that cannot fulfil seismic design criteria, thus making such building frames vulnerable to joint shear failure when subjected to lateral loading or ground excitation. Even in seismic regions, old buildings designed according to the then existing immature seismic design codes lack sufficient hoops inside the joint cores. The joint cores are the most critical components in such frames, and the ultimate failure of such frames under lateral loading would be due to the inadequate shear capacity of the joint core. Hence, such lightly reinforced joints need to be strengthened before exposing them to any form of lateral loading. Reinforced concrete (RC) jacketing is an effective method of retrofitting such connections. In this paper, the usefulness of RC jacketing technique to strengthen lightly reinforced beam-column joints is investigated experimentally