The Seismic Design and Performance of Reinforced Concrete Beam-Column Knee Joints in Buildings

Abstract

The seismic performance of eleven half-scale and three full-sized reinforced concrete beam-column knee joints was tested under inelastic cyclic loading. Twelve joints were designed to the current New Zealand Concrete Standard, NZS 3101 while the remaining two were designed to the 1964 New Zealand Code, which contained few seismic provisions. All the 1995 designs approached or exceeded their nominal beam strengths in both directions and only degraded in strength at displacement ductility factors greater than 2, while the 1960 designs failed prematurely in joint shear at about 70% of the beam nominal strengths. Many of the half-scale joints failed when cover concrete split off in the joint zone, allowing loss of anchorage and slip of the top beam bars. Two full-scale joints were designed to carry the maximum specified code joint shear stress (0.2 f_c^′), and one subsequently failed due to joint shear when the concrete compressive strength did not reach the specified design value. A third full-size joint was tested with distributed beam reinforcement. This joint performed in a ductile manner to displacement ductility 4 but failed in the second cycle at that displacement, due to buckling of several rows of beam bars.