Reinforced concrete (RC) buildings built in the 1980s are vulnerable to seismic behavior because they were designed without any consideration of seismic loads. These buildings have widely spaced transverse reinforcements and a short lap splice length of longitudinal reinforcements, which makes them vulnerable to severe damage or even collapse during earthquakes. The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of bidirectional lateral loads on RC columns with deficient reinforcement details. An experimental test was conducted for two full-scale RC column specimens. The test results of deficient RC columns revealed that bidirectional loading deteriorates the seismic capacity when compared with a column tested unidirectionally. Modeling parameters were extracted from the tested load-displacement response and compared with those proposed in performance-based design standards. The modeling parameters proposed in the standards underestimated the deformation capacity of tested specimens by nearly 50% and overestimated the strength capacity by 15 to 20%.

The plastic hinge region of RC pier ensures its nonlinear behavior during strong earthquake events. It is assumed that the piers secure sufficient strength and ductility in order to prevent the collapse of the bridge during strong earthquake. However, the presence of a lap-splice of longitudinal bars in the plastic hinge region may lead to the occurrence of early bond failure in the lap-splice zone and result in significant loss of the seismic performance. The current regulations for seismic performance evaluation limit the ultimate strain and displacement ductility considering the eventual presence of lap-splice, but do not consider the lap-splice length. In this study, seismic performance test and analysis are performed according to the cross-sectional size and the lap-splice length in the case of longitudinal bars with lap-splice located in the plastic hinge region of existing RC bridge columns with circular cross-section. The seismic behavioral characteristics of the piers are also analyzed. Based upon the results, this paper presents a more reasonable seismic performance evaluation method considering the lap-splice length and the cross-sectional size of the column.

It is known that seismic performance of existing bridges having insufficient lateral confinements and lap-splices of longitudinal reinforcements at the base of column decreases dramatically. In this study, small-scaled model tests have been performed to confirm the seismic behaviors of RC bridge piers with various lap-splice lengths. The 8 test models have circular section with diameters of 0.65 m, 0.8 m, 1.0 m, and lap-splice lengths of B-class or C-class. The test results show that the failure modes of models are not depending on the lap-splice length itself but depend on the ratio of lap-splice length to diameter, and that the displacement ductility is also affected by this ratio.

This paper is to evaluate the flexural characteristics of 180MPa Ultra High Performance Concrete and reinforcing steel. In this study, the bending test is performed to evaluate the flexural characteristics considering lap-splice length. The stability of the lap-splice length proposed the structural design codes are evaluated on load-displacement. The results confirmed that the ductility has increased when the lap-splice has increased.