Experimental Study on Seismic Behavior of Fiber-Reinforced Concrete Structural Walls for Low-Rise Buildings

Abstract eng:
Industrialized reinforced concrete (RC) systems have become a solution widely used in some Latin American countries as an efficient alternative system for housing construction, compared with traditional masonry infilled frames and reinforced masonry systems. Industrialized systems provide high efficiency in construction through an appropriate planning of activities, budget, staff, equipment and materials, generating a fast and effective mass production process. The project intends to validate the behavior of fiber–reinforced concrete structural walls, in order to implement this solution for industrialized systems. The project aims at optimizing the construction time and reinforcement layout, and improving its efficiency without affecting the durability, serviceability and seismic performance of low–rise buildings. As a part of this project, an extensive literature revision process has been conducted on construction and design experience of industrialized RC systems in Colombia and the experimental behavior of RC structural walls under seismic loads. The state–of–the–art of high performance fiber–reinforced concrete has been studied as well, as part of this revision. Several prototypes of low–rise buildings were selected and analyzed for low, intermediate and high seismic hazard scenarios, in order to determine seismic demand characteristics acting on typical structural walls. According to those results, a series of full–scale experimental tests of isolated RC structural walls were designed and planned to be subjected to in–plane quasi–static cyclic loads. The experimental program includes quasi–static test of eight types of walls. The parameters evaluated are the type of high performance concrete mixture (volume fraction of steel fibers), and flexural reinforcement. The paper discusses the effect of seismic demands over low–rise buildings comprised of RC shear walls, and the preliminary results of the first three walls of the experimental program such as the measured performance of structural walls in terms of failure modes, hysteresis curves, and contribution of fiber to shear strength.

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