The latest earthquakes in Europe exposed some critical problems in the connections of cladding panels in industrial precast reinforced concrete (PRC) structures. These connections did not perform as desired, causing the panels to fall, leading to significant nonstructural damage that resulted in the loss of human life and significant socio-economic impacts due to the interruption of business. Furthermore, in addition to the behavior of the cladding system itself, it is still not clear to what extent it can influence the overall seismic performance of the main structure. Making use of a simplified macroelement, the present study assesses the seismic performance of commonly employed cladding-to-structure connections, as well as the interaction of cladding panels with industrial PRC buildings. The analyses were carried out considering a PRC building representative of a Portuguese industrial park, studied with and without cladding panels. The seismic behavior of the structure was assessed considering both nonlinear static and dynamic procedures.

Past earthquakes have brought attention to the poor performance of precast reinforced concrete structures, especially relating to beam-to-column connections. The evaluation of different methodologies for the analysis of beam-to-column connections in industrial buildings is important. In the present work numerical analyses developed allowed the study of the effect that different story heights and connection properties have on frequencies, drifts, seismic coefficients and connection sliding. The results showed that the friction between concrete elements and the consideration of neoprene have a small impact on the drift demands in the columns and the seismic coefficients of the structures analyzed; on the other hand, the effect of steel dowel on the drift demands and seismic coefficients is significant. The comparison of models with different properties and connections allowed a better understanding of the parameters that affect the seismic behavior of precast reinforced concrete buildings the most and provide indications for building more accurate and efficient numerical models.

The construction of a vulnerability model requires reliable information on the features of the buildings in the study. The purpose of this work is the characterisation of the precast industrial buildings in Portuguese industrial park, based on the survey of 73 design projects of existing buildings. The collected data are based on a previous study on the features that influence the seismic response of this type of buildings. The parameters collected are associated with the global geometry and specific elements characteristics (e.g., column dimensions, reinforcement ratios, and connections details), to the mechanical properties of the materials and other parameters that can give some important information in the characterisation of the buildings (e.g., construction year and localization). In the end, a comparison with other available databases, namely, from Italy and Turkey, is done in order to conclude about the similarity. This information is important to define representative experimental specimens and numerical simulation to conduce seismic risk analysis.