Behavior, Analysis and Design og Complex Wall Systems







Laura N. Lowes Dawn E. Lehman

Anna C. Birely University of Washington

Daniel A. Kuchma

Christopher R. Hart Kenneth P. Marley

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign



CHAPTER 1: Introduction

This document provides detailed documentation of the design, testing, and preliminary results of the planar wall test program of the project "Behavior, Analysis, and Design of Complex Wall Systems", a joint effort between the University of Washington (PI Laura Lowes and co-PI Dawn Lehman) and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (co-PI Dan Kuchma). Funded by NEES (George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation) and the Charles Pankow Foundation, the project seeks to establish the seismic performance of modern mid-rise reinforced concrete structural walls and to develop the tools and technologies to advance performance based design of these systems.

In the experimental component of the project, large-scale wall sub-assemblages were tested to improve the understanding of seismic behavior of walls in modern buildings. Walls were tested at the NEES MUST-SIM (Multi-Axial Full-Scale Sub-Structured Testing and Simulation) Facility at the University of Illinois. Use of this facility allowed collection of high resolution data to assist in characterizing the performance of walls. Equipment at the facility allowed for testing of the sub-assemblages with force and displacement control in six-degrees of freedom. This allowed for the testing of large-scale (1/3 scale of prototype walls) in that axial load, lateral load, and overturning moment could be applied to the top of the specimens in a manner such that the base reactions were equivalent to that of a much taller wall with a specified lateral load distribution. The actual specimens represented the bottom three stories of a ten story prototype wall. The full experimental test program consisted of 8 specimens: 4 planar (or rectangular) walls, 1 coupled wall, and 3 C-shaped (or U-shaped) walls. This document is limited to the planar wall test program; similar documents are available for the coupled and C-shaped wall test programs.

The contents of the document are as follows. Chapter 2 provides an overview of the test specimens, including test variables considered, design of the specimens, construction drawings and details on construction of the specimens. Chapter 3 provides material properties data and expected material strengths. Chapter 4 discusses the experimental test set-up, application of loads, and displacement histories. Chapter 5 discusses the data collected including traditional and non-contact instrumentation, high-resolution images, and crack width measurements. Chapter 6 presents the loading and displacement histories applied to the wall specimens. Chapter 7 presents basic experimental results for the tests. Chapter 8 discusses data processing and the availability of the data in the NEES Project Warehouse. The contents of this document are limited to the observed behavior of the tests; results of analysis of the experimental data can be found in the dissertations of Birely (2012), Hart (2011), and Marley (2011).


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