Review of Innovative Rehabilitation Techniques for Reinforced Concrete Buildings

Building rehabilitation encompasses the act of repairing damaged structural elements, as well as the upgrading of older buildings to bring them up to modern standards. In recent years, due to the extreme economic and environmental cost of new construction, building rehabilitation is gaining ground as the most viable solution to the problem posed by damaged or substandard buildings. With the constant development of new materials with favorable properties and the improvement of our understanding of earthquakes, new rehabilitation techniques are being developed, improving on the efficiency and effectiveness of older ones. Reinforced Concrete (RC) buildings are a type of building that emerged in the late 19th century and are designed to sustain controlled damage during earthquakes of certain magnitudes. Since most of the world’s modern seismic design codes were developed in the 1980s or later, a large number of existing RC buildings are unable to handle design earthquake loads sufficiently and require seismic upgrading. Additionally, since RC buildings are designed to sustain damage under earthquakes of large magnitudes, they are also often in need of repair. Due to the above facts, the rehabilitation of RC buildings is a crucial part of their life cycle. In this problem report, innovative rehabilitation techniques for RC buildings developed in recent years are reviewed and presented, including methods for global (structural level) seismic rehabilitation and the element level rehabilitation of RC beams, RC columns, and RC beam-column joints