Recycled Plastic Lumber walls for one and two-story housing: An assessment of their seismic performance

Abstract

Recycled Plastic Lumber (RPL) is a sustainable material that has been proposed in the last years to develop structural systems for low-rise housing in high-seismic hazard zones to reduce plastic pollution and housing deficit. Recently, experimental and analytical studies have been conducted to determine the behavior and the damage states of RPL walls under cyclic loads, and promising results have been obtained. Based on that results, a Mostaghel's six-lines hysteretic model was implemented to simulate the nonlinear behavior and energy dissipation capacity of the RPL walls. Subsequently, the seismic performance assessment of the RPL walls was obtained by nonlinear dynamic analyses using the FEMA P-695 far-field ground motions, which allowed develop fragility functions to estimate the probability of exceeding certain damage states as a function of an intensity measure of seismic hazard. The results of this study evidence that the RPL walls have a suitable seismic performance for their implementation in low-rise housing and meet precisely the Basic Safety performance objective established in the design philosophy of the NSR-10 Colombian building code for this kind of buildings.