Damage to structural walls in the recent earthquakes in Chile (2010) and New Zealand (2011) demonstrated that modern reinforced concrete (RC) walls may not achieve the expected ductile response but could possibly be triggered by out-of-plane displacements of the wall. Following a review of the mechanisms that cause global out-of-plane buckling of RC walls, relevant international code requirements, and past experimental tests, this paper describes the findings from quasi-static cyclic tests of two thin RC walls with single layers of vertical and horizontal reinforcement. The two walls were subjected to uni-directional (inplane) and bi-directional (in-plane and out-of-plane) loading respectively. Both walls experienced significant out-of-plane displacements and damage caused by out-of-plane deformations ultimately triggered the wall in-plane failure. The data obtained with extensive instrumentation of the test units, which included optical measurements of the 3D displacement field, yield new insights into the development of out-of-plane displacements, in particular with regard to: evolution of out-of-plane displacements with imposed in-plane displacements, portion of height and length of the wall that are involved in the out-of-plane instability, influence of both local and global tensile strains on the buckling behaviour and role of bi-directional loading on out-of-plane instability. The tests showed that very significant out-of-plane displacements-larger than half of the wall thickness-can take place without causing out-of-plane wall failure. The damage caused by these large out-of-plane displacements, however, can lead to a premature in-plane failure of the wall.
The present data paper describes an experimental campaign on five thin T-shaped reinforced concrete walls (DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.3490754.v2), which includes: details on the test units, materials, test setup, loading protocol, instrumentation, main features of each unit's response, organization of the provided test data, and examples of derived data. The tests aimed at assessing the influence of wall thickness on member stability, the role of lap splices on damage distribution and displacement ductility, and the effects of the simultaneous application of out-of-plane loading on the member response. A set of five companion test reports, one for each of the tested units, are included in the data set and supplement the present manuscript.
a b s t r a c tAn innovative higher-order beam theory, capable of accurately taking into account flexural-shear-torsional interaction, is originally combined with a force-based formulation to derive the corresponding finite element. The selected set of higher-order deformation modes leads to an explicit and direct interaction between three-dimensional shear and normal stresses. Namely, cross-sectional displacement and strain fields are composed of independent and orthogonal modes, which results in unambiguously defined generalised cross-sectional stress-resultants and in a minimisation of the coupling of equilibrium equations. On the basis of work-equivalency to three-dimensional continuum theory, dual one-dimensional higherorder equilibrium and compatibility equations are derived. The former, which govern an advanced form of beam equilibrium, are strictly satisfied via stress fields arising from the solution of the corresponding systems of coupled differential equations. The formulation, which is numerically validated in a companion paper for both linear and nonlinear material response, inherently avoids shear-locking and accurately accounts for span loads. Finally, the superiority of force-based approaches over displacement-based ones, well established for inelastic behaviour, is also demonstrated for the linear elastic case.
The severe damage and collapse of many reinforced concrete (RC) wall buildings in the recent earthquakes of Chile (2010) and New Zealand (2011) have shown that RC walls did not perform as well as required by the modern codes of both countries. It seems therefore appropriate to intensify research efforts towards more accurate simulations of damage indicators, in particular local engineering demand parameters such as material strains, which are central to the application of performance-based earthquake engineering. Potential modelling improvements will necessarily build on a thorough assessment of the limitations of current state-ofthe-practice simulation approaches for RC wall buildings. This work compares different response parameters obtained from monotonic analyses of RC walls using numerical tools that are commonly employed by researchers and specialized practitioners, namely: plastic hinge analyses, distributed plasticity models, and shell element models. It is shown that a multi-level assessment-wherein both the global and local levels of the response are jointly addressed during pre-and post-peak response-is fundamental to define the dependability of the results. The displacement demand up to which the wall response can be predicted is defined as the first occurrence between the attainment of material strain limits and numerical issues such as localization. The present work also presents evidence to discourage the application of performance-based assessment of RC walls relying on nonregularized strain EDPs.
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