Seismic Response of Low Aspect Ratio Reinforced Concrete Walls

Bismarck N. Luna, Jonathan Rivera, Siamak Epackachi and Andrew S. Whittaker

MCEER-18-0002 | 04/21/2018 | 456 pages

Revision 01 | 09/10/2019

Keywords: Earthquake engineering, reinforced concrete, shear critical, peak strength, hysteresis, load paths, buildings, nuclear structures

Revision: Some of the entries in columns 4 and 5 of Table 6.8 have been revised (9/10/2019).

Abstract: The main objective of this report is to improve the profession’s understanding of the seismic behavior of low aspect ratio reinforced concrete shear walls by analyzing data from tests of 12 large scale wall specimens at the Structural Engineering and Earthquake Simulation Laboratory at the University at Buffalo. This report 1) documents the design, construction, test setup, instrumentation and testing of the 12 reinforced concrete shear wall specimens, 2) presents information from the 12 tests, including global force-displacement relationships, drifts and forces at the initiation of cracking of concrete and yielding of reinforcement, patterns of concrete cracking, modes of failure, strain distributions at peak strength, and contributions to total lateral drift and out-of-plane displacements, and 3) provides a technical basis for the effective elastic stiffness of reinforced concrete shear walls for use in design practice, and equations for peak shear strength of low aspect ratio walls suitable for inclusion in standards such as ACI 318, ACI 349 and ASCE 43.