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Summary This paper develops a disc spring (DS) device to improve the self‐centering capability of a conventional reinforced concrete (RC) shear wall. In particular, the DS devices are installed at the foot of the RC shear wall, thus forming a self‐centering RC shear wall (SCSW) system. The DS devices used in the SCSW system are expected to protect the RC wall from damage and provide restoring force for the system. The design method of the DS device is first presented, and mechanical equations are proposed to predict the loading force–displacement relationship of the DS device. A nonlinear regression method is also introduced to better describe the relationship between the friction force and torque for the DS device with friction materials. One friction device, four DS devices, and three SCSW specimens were finally designed and tested under cyclic loadings to investigate their hysteretic performances. The results demonstrate that the friction material exhibits stable and satisfactory energy dissipation, and all the designed DS devices exhibit good self‐centering capability and stable energy dissipation, which steadily increases with the increase of the friction force. The mechanical behaviors of the designed DS devices during loading stages are also effectively predicted by the proposed mechanical equations. Furthermore, the designed SCSWs with DS devices are demonstrated to exhibit desirable earthquake‐resilient performance.

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In this study, a combined performance-based seismic failure mode identification and multi-objective optimization method is proposed, in which the failure probability function is introduced to identify the primary structural failure mode with a certain probability level, and the structural damage and hysteretic energy are taken as indices in the objective function to improve the structure's seismic performance. Taking a 20-story steel frame structure as an example, seismic failure modes are identified and optimized using this method. Results indicate that global damage to the optimized structure is reduced under 62% earthquake excitations, while the hysteretic energy dissipation capacity of the optimized structure is improved under 48.3% earthquake excitations. Furthermore, the distribution of the optimized structure's inter-story drift ratio is more uniform than in the original structure, leading to a significant improvement of the structural seismic performance.