Seismic Resilience of Concrete Moment Frames with Fibrous Rubberized Beam-Column Joints

Ensuring resilience through rapid buildings recovery in seismic zones has been placed at the forefront of recent studies. However, studies that compare the relative resilience of buildings constructed with different materials are lacking. This paper focuses on a comparative resilience analysis of concrete moment frames where beam-column connections are made with varying types of concrete mixtures. The connections are made with normal strength concrete (NSC), rubberized concrete (RbC), steel fiber rubberized concrete (STFRC), synthetic fiber rubberized concrete (SYFRC), and high strength concrete (HSC). Nonlinear static pushover and incremental dynamic analysis (IDA) are utilized to understand system response and the level of damage sustained following an earthquake. Subsequently, seismic fragility functions are constructed for the five considered frame types. The frames are subjected to different seismic scenarios, and the corresponding losses, recovery time, and resilience are quantified. A comparison between the five frame types is carried out to examine the optimal concrete mixture to be used to reduce damage probabilities, total direct losses, and recovery time and subsequently enhance resilience. The results show that rubberized concrete strengthened with steel and synthetic fibers can reduce economic losses by up to 19% and increase building resilience by up to 37% compared with the frames constructed with normal strength concrete.