Resilience Evaluation of Seismically Detailed Reinforced Concrete-Block Shear Walls for Blast-Risk Assessment

Abstract

AbstractThe increased demand for resilient infrastructure under accidental or deliberate explosions has resulted in the urgent need to quantify the performance of both existing and new building components under such extreme loading events. The current study focuses on evaluating the resilience of reinforced masonry (RM) shear wall systems under blast, which is accomplished by quantifying the walls’ blast response in the out-of-plane direction and the resulting damage levels. In seismic zones, such RM walls are detailed to resist in-plane loads in a ductile manner, and thus minimal damage is usually expected. Given that blast resistant design of civilian buildings only recently has been formally introduced in North American design standards, quantifying the out-of-plane response and ductility capacities of RM shear walls has not been common practice in mainstream building design. In this paper, a nonlinear single-degree-of-freedom (SDOF) model is developed to predict the out-of-plane response of RM wall co...