Hysteretic performance of dovetail profiled steel–concrete composite sandwich shear walls

Abstract

Dovetail profiled steel–concrete composite sandwich shear wall (DPCW) is a novel composite member with the potential to serve as a lateral-resisting member in buildings. The DPCW is composed of two dovetail profiled steel sheets (DPSs) and concrete in between. The dovetail-shaped ribs of DPSs embedded in the concrete can not only enable the steel–concrete composite action without additional connectors but also improve the ductility of the shear wall due to the presence of vertical dovetail-shaped slits in the concrete panel. However, there were limited investigations regarding its hysteretic behaviour. In this paper, the hysteretic performance of DPCWs was investigated by experiments and numerical studies. Six DPCW specimens with different axial compression ratios and shear span ratios were tested subjected to the combined axial and cyclic lateral loads. All specimens failed in a ductile manner with failure modes of local tension fields developed on strips of the DPSs and crushing of concrete at the top and bottom between the dovetail-shaped slits. With the increase of axial compression ratio, the lateral stiffness was increased but the ductility was reduced. Both the deformability and energy dissipation capacity of DPCWs were improved with the increase of the shear span ratio. Then, numerical studies using the commercial software package ABAQUS were performed to further investigate the failure mechanism of DPCWs and the effect of the shear span ratio and axial compression ratio on its lateral behavior. Moreover, based on experimental results and FE analysis, a simplified model was established for evaluating the lateral resistance capacity of DPCWs. The proposed prediction formulae were found to agree with the test results with no more than an 8% discrepancy.