Assessment of an existing reinforced concrete (RC) prefabricated building: the case of the procédé Camus

Prefabricated residential construction forms a large portion of the European building stock and needs to be upgraded to current living standards and, if applicable, to current seismic resistance requirements. In fact, as indicated by the European Union in 2011, the refurbishment of the structures built during the second half of the twentieth century is priority for the entire construction sector. However, this process is affected primarily by the lack of knowledge of the material and construction aspects of prefabricated buildings, which makes the development of economic and efficient refurbishment interventions difficult. Based on this need, this paper focuses on the assessment of the seismic structural behavior of residential buildings built using the prefabrication procédé Camus, widely used in France and in many European countries, including Italy, during the 1960s. The analysis was carried out on a typological building placed in the city of Bologna, as this region concentrates an important number of prefabricated structures that had been recently affected by several earthquakes. Results show that due to the building layout, the analyzed structure has significantly higher lateral stiffness and better structural performance in the transverse direction than in the longitudinal direction. In fact, it was observed that the structural prefabricated walls located in the longitudinal direction will need to be strengthened in order to fulfill current requirements for shear strength and the combined effect of axial loads and bending moments.