Is precast a more reliable structure material, especially during an earthquake?

[SabinaV]

[WindAtMyBack]

You would have to research the material itself. The total strength has to do with the entire system which involves hundreds of things.

I used to build houses in an earthquake prone area. It was not as high risk as other areas but we still had some earthquake codes. The biggest difference that I noticed compared to other houses, was that we tied the structure to the foundation a lot more strongly. I don't know the nature of earthquake damage, but they obviously didn't want the house sliding off the foundation.

Overall, there was a lot more metal in the structure. I'm talking about metal straps and ties. So everything is tied together more strongly.

There are a lot of different forces acting on a house. The entire house contributes to resisting those forces. All of the walls (both exterior and interior), the roof, the floor, the siding, and even the drywall contribute to the strength. Sometimes even a denser nailing pattern is specified. Thousands of nails have a lot of strength.

[NathanDavis]

construction structures, should be reinforced and prestressed according to regulations for seismic zones... if you follow those guidelines and of course, have a good design of buildings then it should do fairly well or acceptable

more than the "blocks and beams" of the structure, it is the joints that will have to withstand the punishment from the earthquakes, and also, the designs of the foundations can absorb most of the punishment

as usual.. it is all about the people building the structure, they could swear to you that they have built an earthquake resistant building when in reality they replaced materials, spared costs, and left the design and construction to a multitude of sub-contractors that were not well informed about what all others were doing, and that building won't last long nor stand

[SabinaV]

Is it safe when the house's structure is built from precast?

Will it be critical if the steel bar is less or more when connecting the beams together.

[NathanDavis]

this is a difficult question...

in general, a house is one or two stories, perhaps three levels... which makes precast more usual and safer in general

now, to your question about being critical to use or more less steel bars, that is not ideal especially if you are using LESS than the specifications, regulations or requirements that are legal and recommended for your very specific country, area and local region

how critical would that be depends, on how much of more or less was used or not used when building a house... regulations are there for these reasons

[MTC29]

How well precast concrete walls do under seismic loads depends largely on the quality of the precast concrete and the quality of the design. Add in steel reinforcement, which can handle large tensile forces, and you have a wall or fence that can handle high loads in any orientation.

Precast will move and sway with the shocks from an earthquake, which is a benefit, as opposed concrete masonry units (CMU) which are not as flexible. The large inertia ends with the walls cracking and separating due to poor bonding.

Bachelor of Science, Civil Engineering, Structural Engineer (structures one and two).

Master of Engineering, Materials Science.

[AviatorTom]

Not necessarily. It takes some serious engineering to design and build a building that can withstand an earthquake. The key to that is flexibility... the building must be able to move when the ground shakes, but not move too much that it tears itself apart.

[IsoUser]

To be perfectly honest, it all depends upon the concrete ingredients and how flexible it is otherwise it leads to complete Failure and loss of life. But given today's twentieth century structures I personally wouldn't live in any of them because of shoddy conditions and half assed unsupervised construction. Hence the Florida Disaster. Cheap Labor = Shoddy half assed construction and ingredients in prepourred concrete

[Dargil]

Precast Hollow core can be very stable but connections to the supporting structure must be designed to resist shear and uplift caused by seismic forces.

[exitseven]

If there was rebar in the concrete they would be pretty strong.

[andreasderjuengere]

Is that some kind of ''advertising''?

[Likes2drive]

Probably yeah