Seismic Performance of RC Coupled Short-Pier Shear Walls with Concealed Bracing

Abstract

The RC short-pier shear wall structure is a new type of structural system in tall residential buildings. It has been applied in many buildings in China, but its seismic performance is worse than that of normal shear wall structures. Therefore, how to improve its seismic performance becomes a problem which has been paid much attention by engineers. In this paper, the seismic performance of short-pier shear walls with concealed bracing is investigated. An experimental study of four 1:3 scale coupled short-pier shear wall specimens has been carried out, two of which were normal coupled short-pier shear walls, and the other two coupled short-pier shear walls with concealed bracing. Based upon the experimental study, the effects of concealed bracing on the load-carrying capacity, stiffness, ductility, hysteretic behavior, energy dissipation and failure mechanism of shear wall are discussed. It is shown that the seismic performance of short-pier shear walls is greatly improved by concealed bracing. Finally, mechanical models for calculating the load-carrying capacity of the shear wall are proposed, and the theoretical results agree well with those from experiments.

Enhancing Seismic and Resilient Performance of Resilient Walls with Concealed Bracings: Experimental and Numerical Investigation

“…The increased stiffness would expose the structural walls to larger lateral force, making it critical to ensure the shearbearing capacity of the structural walls. The installation of concealed bracings improved their shear resistance capacity and limited the development of oblique cracks (Cao et al 2006;Cortés-Puentes and Palermo 2018;Li et al 2022). During the loading process, if significant plastic deformation occurred in concealed bracings, it inevitably led to greater irreversible deformation.…”

“…Adding bracing is a method that not only ensures efficient utilization of steel but also obviously increases shear stiffness. Concealed bracing can increase the load-bearing capacity of the walls and delay the stiffness degradation (Cao et al 2006;Li et al 2022), which has a significant impact on the residual displacement of the specimen (Macrae and Kawashima 1997;Ibrahim et al 2016). Consequently, to avoid the impact of bracing yield on the residual displacement and resilience of the wall, this research proposed the reinforcement method using concealed bracing composed of UHSB bars within the walls.…”

Study on Improvement for Seismic Behavior of Reinforced Concrete Shear Walls

“…The diagonal reinforcing bars may easily bend and the wall performance may decrease under great compressive stress [16] [17] . Cao Wanlin [18], [21] has proposed the shear walls with concealed steel bracing, which can prevent the buckling occurring to the diagonal reinforcing bars and obviously improve the bearing capacity, energy dissipation capacity and ductility as well as seismic behavior.…”

Effect of axial compression ratio on concrete-filled steel tube composite shear wall

“…In fact, a few researchers have proposed similar ideas in recent years, and they can be divided into several categories. The first one is steel-reinforced concrete (SRC) SWs which add shaped steel or steel tubes in the boundary of SWs (Hu et al, 2016;Liao et al, 2012); the second one is to include single or double steel plates in the SWs (Eom et al, 2009;Hossain and Wright, 2004;Luo et al, 2015); the third one comprises steel frame boundary and infilled RC walls (Liao et al, 2009); and others such as bundled lipped channelconcrete (BLC-C) composite walls (Chen et al, 2016) and SWs with concealed bracing (Cao et al, 2003(Cao et al, , 2006 were also discussed. Extensive studies have shown that the bearing capacity, energy dissipation capacity, and ductility of those steel-concrete composite SWs are better than those of cast-in-place RCSWs.…”