Experimental Study of Concrete Tunnel Form Buildings

The tunnel form buildings are used for mass construction in many countries. This construction method is very interesting because of its fast construction technique and low cost. But there is deficiency of researches about tunnel form building in comparison to the other conventional building systems. There are no special requirements for seismic analysis and design of this type of buildings. According to high risk of earthquake and using of this construction method in many projects in Iran, some more studies should be done to evaluate seismic behaviour of tunnel form buildings. In this paper, an experimental program was performed in which the testing of two three-story 1/5-scale of the tunnel form building were carried out to clarify the seismic behaviour of structures. The experimental program consisted of some cyclic loadings and forced vibration tests in order to study the failure mechanisms and the effects of cracking on the fundamental period. The behavior of the specimens was simulated by finite element model and a good correlation was obtained between experimental and numerical results. This study showed that the tunnel form buildings have low level of ductility and brittle failure mechanism was observed.