• Hoult, Ryan
• Pacheco De Almeida, João

Abstract

Recent seismic events have shown that permanent damage and deformations of buildings prevent the structure from being serviceable, imposing high costs associated with repairs or demolition. The yielding and inelasticity of the steel rebars in the boundary ends of modern designed reinforced concrete walls are generally the source of residual displacements for reinforced concrete buildings. This paper investigates the residual displacement of reinforced concrete walls detailed with either conventional steel or shape memory alloys in the boundary ends of the wall. The force-displacement response of a large dataset of reinforced concrete flexurally-governed walls is analysed to derive the residual displacement as a function of inplane displacement (or drift). The existing very few experimental results on reinforced concrete walls detailed with shape memory alloys are also examined. On average, walls detailed with conventional steel are found to attain residual displacement less than the permissible limit for drifts up to 1.5%. The shape memory alloy walls are generally shown to perform better, with an estimate of the permissible limit being reached at approximately 2.0% drift. However, some design deficiencies from two of three wall specimens detailed with shape memory alloys resulted in poor performance. Thus, more experimental testing is needed on reinforced concrete walls detailed with shape memory alloys to increase confidence in using these materials in practice.

Topics

• impedance spectroscopy
• laser emission spectroscopy
• steel
• diffuse reflectance infrared Fourier transform spectroscopy