The Earthquake Engineering Online Archive

Mechanical characteristics of materials used in a 1/5 scale model of a 7-story reinforced concrete test structure

Bertero, Vitelmo V.; Aktan, Ahmet E.; Harris, Harry G.; Chowdhury, Abed A.

UCB/EERC-83/21, Earthquake Engineering Research Center, University of California, Berkeley, 1983-10, 79 pages (515/B47/1983)

The U.S.-Japan Cooperative Research Program and the associated integrated analytical and experimental research program in progress at UC Berkeley incorporate the construction and testing of a seven-story, full-scale reinforced concrete frame-wall structure in Japan and a true replica 1/5 scale model of this structure at UC Berkeley. One of the primary objectives of the research is to evaluate the reliability of experimental analysis of reinforced concrete at all response limit states, using a true replica medium-scale model. This report documents the efforts undertaken by the researchers to attain material similitude for the 1/5 scale model. The consequences of unavoidable distortions between the stress-strain constitutive relations and physical properties of reduced-scale and full-scale model materials on the correlation of all the limit state responses of these two structural models are evaluated. On the basis of this evaluation, the authors discuss conclusions about there still remaining significant limitations in the state of the practice of reduced-scale model fabrication. The authors believe this is particularly so in micro-concrete fabrication, in which the mechanical (dynamic) characteristics and physical properties of the concrete used in the full-scale model are duplicated.

Available online: http://nisee.berkeley.edu/documents/EERC/EERC-83-21.pdf (3 MB)