Copyright to IJIRSET www.ijirset.com 53 ISSN (Online) : 2319 - 8753 ISSN (Print) : 2347 - 6710 International Journal of Innovative Research in Science, Engineering and Technology An ISO 3297: 2007 Certified Organization, Volume 2, Special Issue 1, December 2013 Proceedings of International Conference on Energy and Environment-2013 (ICEE 2013) On 12 th to 14 th December Organized by Department of Civil Engineering and Mechanical Engineering of Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Technology, Kottayam, Kerala, India SEISMIC STRENGTHENING OF EXTERIOR RC BEAM-COLUMN JOINTS BYADVANCED FERROCEMENT JACKETING Kannan P., Sivakumar S., Dr. Bindhu K.R. P.G. Student, Dept. of Civil Engineering, College of Engineering Trivandrum, Kerala, 695016, India Associate Professor, Dept. of Civil Engineering, College of Engineering Trivandrum, Kerala, 695016, India Associate Professor, Dept. of Civil Engineering, College of Engineering Trivandrum Kerala, 695016, India ABSTRACT In a RC framed structure, beam-column joints are highly vulnerable to failure when subjected to seismic loads. RC framed structures constructed in accordance to pre-seismic codes will have deficiencies at the beam-column region, resulting in poor performance of the same when subjected to large lateral loads. In this study, six scaled down models of the beam-column joint of a non-seismically designed structure was prepared. Retrofit in the form of ferrocement jackets were applied on the con-trol specimen. Two types of ferrocement jacketing schemes were used, first one is the conventional square jacketing and the second is the advanced jacketing scheme in which the beam and column corners were rounded prior to the application of jackets. All the specimens were subjected to quasi static reverse cyclic loading. The experimental re-sults showed that there is an improvement in ultimate load carrying capacity, ultimate deflection, energy dissipation capacity and ductility for jacketed specimens compared to that of control specimens. The advanced ferrocement jack-eting technique was found to have slightly better perfor- mance compared to the conventional square jacketing. 1. INTRODUCTION The buildings designed in accordance to pre-seismic codes are capable of carrying vertical loads only and hence called gravity load designed (GLD) structures. These struc-tures exhibit a column hinging mechanism of failure when subjected to lateral loads and hence the failure is highly catastrophic. For a beam hinging mechanism to occur (so that the failure shall be localised in nature), the columns should be stronger than the beams in the framed structure. For providing such a property to the beam-column joints, a number of jacketing schemes have been adopted. The most common ones are RC jacketing, steel jacketing, fibre reinforced polymeric composite(FRPC) jacketing, ferroce-ment jacketing and shotcrete jacketing [1–3]. Among these RC jacketing is the most commonly used method, but the major disadvantage is that it increases the dead weight of the structure to a great extent, thereby altering the