PSI - Issue 78

Emanuele Brunesi et al. / Procedia Structural Integrity 78 (2026) 161–168

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base of the walls), the base wall connection consists simply of high-strength mortar joints. Thus, once the precast ground-floor walls are erected by seating them onto spacers positioned in-between their base and the foundation, steel diagonal props are temporarily used to shore up the walls, holding them as upright as possible. After such an operation is completed, precast slab panels featuring no shear keys are settled on the walls, with the support of cranes, so that the concrete topping can be grouted up. A layer of fabric felt is typically used as interface material between the hollow core slabs and the walls supporting them, however, it is a quite common occurrence that the wall-to-floor connection is in the end made up of the same non-shrink, low-strength mortar employed for the other structural interfaces. This is due essentially to the fact that both fabrication imperfections of the wall panels, as well as excessive pre-bending in the slab panels may lead to a situation whereby the wall panels are not fully in contact with the slab. Customary practice is that, should a gap be present/identified between the precast wall/slab panels, it has to be filled-in before the erection of the upper floor (and after the removal of fabric felts, whenever possible); this did happen to one of the two precast test specimen as well, as detailed much further in Brunesi et al. (2019a). Interested readers are thus directly referred to that study as well as to Brunesi et al. (2018a), the latter collecting details of the nominally identical counterpart specimen tested by means of actuators. For the sake of brevity and page limits, Figure 3 hereafter could only show very few construction details, of a three-way panel connection and of a wall base before high-strength mortar grout.

Fig. 1. Example of single- and multi-unit terraced houses in Groningen.

Fig. 2. Two-storey single-bay reinforced precast concrete specimens before shake-table testing and cyclic testing.

Fig. 3. Detail of a three-way panel-to-panel steel connectors before grouting and plastic spacers underneath wall panels.