Experimental Study And Numerical Simulation On Dynamic Behavior Of RC Shear Walls Under Rapid Loadings

The study on the mechanical behavior of reinforced concrete (RC) shear wall, asone of the major structural member of high-rise building structures, under dynamicloadings such as earthquake is crucial to anti-seismic design of engineering structures.The strain rate has obvious effect on the mechanical behavior of concrete material.But in current anti-seismic design code, the effect of strain rate on the constitutivelaw of concrete material, load carrying capacity, deformation, energy dissipationcapacity and failure mode of structural members under strong dynamic loadings arenot considered. Available test results on the dynamic behavior of RC shear walls arelimited because of the limitation of the large-scale test facilities for dynamic tests. So,it is important to study the dynamic behavior of RC shear wall under rapid loadings.This paper describes experimental study and simulation on the seismic behaviorsof RC shear wall under rapid loading. Moreover, embedded piezoelectric leadzirconate titanate (PZT) based functional element are employed to monitor thedamage of the specimens.(1) Experimental study on a series of RC shear walls under quasi-static or rapidlateral cyclic reversed and monotonous loads are carried out. The effect of theloadings rate, reinforcement ratio, axial compression ratio, high aspect ratio andloading pattern on the behaviors of RC shear walls including displacement ductility,strength degradation, stiffness degradation, energy dissipation and residualdeformation are investigated. The results show that strength degradation, stiffnessdegradation and residual deformation rate are more serious under rapid loadings thanthem under static loadings. The displacement ductility reduces under rapid loadings.The effect of reinforcement ratio, axial compression ratio and high aspect ratio on thebehavior of RC shear wall specimens are similar under rapid loadings are similar tothat under quasi-static loadings.(2) Finite element analysis on the dynamic behavior of the test specimens byintroducing the strain rate effect to the plastic damage model of concrete withABAQUS is carried out to simulate the dynamic behavior of the specimens. The finiteelement model is validated by comparing the simulated results of RC shear wallspecimens with the test results.(3) Utilizing embedded piezoelectric lead zirconate titanate (PZT) based functional element active damage detection technique, the damage condition of theRC shear wall specimens under different loading displacement is monitored with adamage index called as root mean square deviation (RMSD) based on frequencyresponse function of the measurement of the functional element. The experimentalresults show that the approach can effectively monitor the damage condition ofconcrete shear walls.