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Reinforced concrete buildings typically utilise structural (or shear) walls as their primary lateral load resisting system. The U-shaped wall is a popular cross-sectional shape used in construction as it can enclose a service core, elevators (lifts), stairs and bathroom facilities. Although U-shaped walls are prevalent throughout the reinforced concrete building stock of both regions of high seismicity and low-to-moderate seismicity, there have been very few studies and experimental tests conducted on non-rectangular reinforced concrete walls. Some Latin American countries have recently moved to construction of mid- and high-rise reinforced concrete buildings with structural walls. In order to reduce material costs, which are critical in these areas of South America with respect to labour costs, very thin walls with only one layer of non-ductile steel reinforcing bars are being used. Until recently, building codes allowed this type of construction in Australia, where there is likely to be an abundance of highly stressed, lightly reinforced precast walls embedded within the building stock. To the authors knowledge, there are no experimental results for reinforce concrete U-shaped walls detailed with a single layer of vertical reinforcement. Thus, the seismic performance of such walls is largely unknown. Therefore, large-scale tests of thin U-shaped walls with a single layer of vertical reinforcement were conducted in the Earthquake Engineering and Structural Dynamics Laboratory at École Polytechnique Fèdèrale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. This research paper presents some of the design considerations as well as the test setup and loading protocol of the Ushaped walls under horizontal quasi-static cyclic loading. The initial results of the test are then briefly discussed, including the force-displacement hysteresis and failure mechanisms. |
