Old reinforced concrete buildings constructed around 1980’s in many developing countries have been designed against mainly gravity load. Beam-column joints in these buildings contain slightly or no shear reinforcement inside the panel zones due to the construction convenience, and are vulnerable to shear failure in beam-column joints under the action of earthquake loads, especially for the exterior beam-column joints. This experimental study aimed to investigate the seismic performance of five half-scale exterior beam-column joints simulating the joints in existing reinforced-concrete buildings with non-shear hoop details. The test results showed that the structural performances of the beam-column joints under earthquake including failure mode, load-drift ratio relationship, shear strain of the joints and energy dissipation are strongly affected by the amount of longitudinal reinforcing bars of beams.
