Experimental investigation of a new self-centering shear wall with resilient hinge devices

Abstract

In order to reduce the residual displacement of building structures caused by the damage on the reinforced concrete shear wall, this study develops a novel self-centering shear wall with resilient hinge devices. One device and three wall specimens are designed, and their hysteretic performance is investigated under low cyclic loading tests. The resilient hinge device which uses disc springs as the spring system is essentially a self-centering axial loaded device with an asymmetric flag-shaped hysteretic response. The experimental results demonstrate that the novel wall exhibits symmetrical flag-shaped hysteretic behavior and has a high self-centering performance. Its residual inter-story drift ratio is only 0.58% at a loading inter-story drift ratio reaching 3%. Compared with the conventional wall, the proposed self-centering shear wall has less wallboard damage, 10% degradation in peak bearing capacity, at least 50% improvement in deformation capacity, 26% degradation in equivalent viscous damping ratio, and 70% increase in total energy dissipation.