Seminar on Cyclic Behavior of Reinforced Concrete Core Walls

Speaker

Dr Katrin Beyer is Assistant Professor for Earthquake Engineering at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. After her undergraduate studies at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ), she worked for two years for the consulting firm ARUP in London, UK, on projects related to structural dynamics, impact and seismic analysis. She received her PhD from the Rose School, Pavia, Italy. Her research interests include large-scale structural tests, the seismic behaviour of non-rectangular RC walls and of unreinforced masonry structures and the torsional response of asymmetric buildings when subjected to seismic excitation.

Abstract

Although core structures are often used in reinforced concrete buildings as members providing lateral strength and stiffness, experimental and numerical studies on their inelastic cyclic behavior are scarce. The presentation presents own tests on U-shaped walls, which were subjected to a bi-directional quasi-static cyclic loading regime, and discusses important characteristics of the tests such as the failure mechanisms and deformation components. The test revealed that for core walls for certain directions of loading the contribution of shear deformations to the total deformations can be much larger than for rectangular walls. This needs also to be considered when modeling the walls. In this study the core walls were modeled using the wide-column analogy because it combines the merits of representing core walls as a three-dimensional structure with inelastic properties while still being relatively simple and easy to set up when compared to shell or solid element models. It is therefore a tool which is not only available to researchers but also to design engineers.