Seismic Safety Assessment of Buildings with Fly-Ash Concrete

Abstract

Sustainable concrete construction has encouraged the utilization of industrial wastes [fly ash (FA), silica fume, ground granulated blast furnace slag, metakaolin, and so forth] as a composite cementitious material due to its high pozzolanic activity. Among them, fly-ash concrete is gaining high popularity in the construction industry due to its many benefits to concrete structures, including increased structural performance. To estimate the seismic performance of FA concrete buildings, a probabilistic study was performed to determine its mechanical parameters at various performance limit states. Weibull, normal, log-normal, and gamma distribution probability distribution models were considered for three goodness-of-fit tests: the Kolmogorov–Smirnov (KS), chi-square (CS), and log-likelihood (LK) tests. Among them, the lognormal distribution was found to be the closest distribution describing the variations in the mechanical properties of FA concrete compared with other distributions. It was observed that 20%–40% partial replacement of FA with cement improves the performance of structures with enhanced structural safety at economical cost.