Residual Displacements of Reinforced Concrete Walls Detailed with Conventional Steel and Shape Memory Alloy Rebars

Abstract

This dataset gathers the experimental and numerical results and interpretation of reinforced concrete walls detailed with conventional steel and shape memory alloy rebars. The primary focus of this study is residual displacements of reinforced concrete walls. The Abstract of the corresponding paper is given below: Modern reinforced concrete design codes can generally achieve the primary performance level of no collapse in the event of a rare to very rare earthquake. However, recent seismic events have shown that permanent damage and deformations of buildings prevent the structure from being serviceable, imposing high costs associated with repairs or demolition. To decrease societal and economic impacts, a revised performance objective limiting certain structures to remain operational under a very rare earthquake event is necessary, which requires engineers to implement better structural technologies. Shape memory alloys have the ability to recover large strains upon removal of stress. Thus, replacing conventional steel with superelastic alloy rebars in the boundary ends of reinforced concrete walls has the potential to reduce residual seismic displacements for these types of buildings. This research paper investigates the lateral residual displacement of reinforced concrete walls detailed with conventional steel and shape memory alloy bars as a function of the in-plane drift. Namely, the force-displacement hysteresis of a large dataset of experimental walls with conventional steel are used to study the residual displacement as a function of several key design parameters. A state-of-the-art finite element modelling program is then used to investigate the residual displacements of walls detailed with shape memory alloy bars, and a parametric study is undertaken to investigate the influence of residual displacements of reinforced concrete walls with superelastic alloys. Most of the walls analysed achieved residual displacements less than the permissible limit at large drift levels. The axial load was found to help suppress the residual displacements of walls with increasing drift. The inelastic curvatures were found to be distributed over a limited height at the base that was similar to the length of the shape memory alloy bar used. Plastic hinge analysis expressions are adapted to estimate the displacement capacity of reinforced concrete walls with shape memory alloys.