Flexural Compression Capacity of Thin Reinforced Concrete Structural Walls

Published

June 25, 2018

Author(s)

Christopher L. Segura, Carlos Arteta, John Wallace

Abstract

Stability of slender reinforced concrete walls has become an issue of interest for researchers since observations of their performance in recent earthquakes indicated that code compliant walls may be vulnerable to brittle compression failure and rebar buckling prior to achieving code-allowable drift limits. To understand the issues that led to poor performance of these walls, researchers have conducting tests on code-compliant wall specimens. To test the compressive strain limits at the edge of the walls, some of these tests have been conducted on isolated boundary elements with uniform compressive loading (zero curvature), which is a more economical approach than tests on full wall specimens. To analyze the influence of curvature in predicted flexural compression capacity, two code compliant walls were subjected to combined axial load and reversed cyclic lateral loading, and three rectangular boundary element specimens, representative of the confined compression region of a wall, were subjected to monotonic compression to failure. Results from this small set of experimental data were used to estimate a relationship between compression strain capacity (at the extreme compression fiber) and strain gradient. The results suggest that isolated boundary element tests define a lower bound of the actual compressive strain limits to predict the flexural compression capacity of a wall under cyclic loading.

Proceedings Title

Proceedings of the Eleventh U.S. National Conference on Earthquake Engineering

Conference Dates

June 25-29, 2018

Conference Location

Los Angeles, CA

Conference Title

Eleventh U.S. National Conference on Earthquake Engineering

Pub Type

Conferences

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Keywords

reinforced concrete, structural wall, shear wall, compression strain, drift capacity, boundary element

Citation

Segura, C. , Arteta, C. and Wallace, J. (2018), Flexural Compression Capacity of Thin Reinforced Concrete Structural Walls, Proceedings of the Eleventh U.S. National Conference on Earthquake Engineering, Los Angeles, CA, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=925354 (Accessed April 26, 2024)