International Concrete Abstracts Portal

Title: Assessment of 2015 and 2018 E-Defense 10-Story Reinforced Concrete Buildings Based on ACI 318 and ASCE 7 Provisions

Author(s): Mehmet E. Unal, Kristijan Kolozvari, John W. Wallace, Koichi Kajiwara, Jae-Do Kang, Yusuke Tosauchi, Eiji Sato, Toshimi Kabeyasawa, Hitoshi Shiohara, Takuya Nagae, and Toshikazu Kabeyasawa

Publication: CRC

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Appears on pages(s): 87

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DOI:

Date: 8/5/2025

Abstract:
The E-Defense shake table facility, the world’s largest three-dimensional (3-D) full-scale earthquake testing facility, was constructed by the National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Resilience (NIED) in 2005 in Miki, Japan. Since then, over 80 full-scale or large-scale experiments have been conducted to have a better understanding of the effects of earthquakes on structures. In December 2015 and later in December 2018 and January 2019, NIED tested two 10-story reinforced concrete (RC) buildings on the E-Defense shake table. The main purpose of this report is to evaluate these buildings using the current provisions of ACI 318 (2019) and ASCE 7(2017), and to gain better knowledge on the effectiveness and accuracy of these standards. The lateral force resisting systems for the buildings consisted of special reinforced concrete shear walls(bearing wall systems) in one direction and special reinforced concrete moment frames(moment resisting frame systems) in the orthogonal direction. Three-dimensional elastic models are created using the structural engineering software ETABSⓍR 2018. Model results showed that, for the 2015 test structure, beam and column shear reinforcement and transverse reinforcement for special boundary elements (SBEs) were modestly less than required by ACI 318-19 provisions. Although diagonal shear cracks were reported within some beam-column joints after the 2015 experiment, current provisions of ASCE 41-17 were not able to predict these joint shear failures, although more detailed approaches proposed in the literature suggested joint damage might occur. For the 2018 building, joint and column transverse reinforcement and column-to-beam strength ratios were increased such that they satisfied ACI 318-19 provisions; however, special boundary elements transverse reinforcement and beam shear reinforcement near beam ends still were modestly less than required by ACI 318-19.