Seismic behavior of precast concrete coupled shear walls with engineered cementitious composite (ECC) in the critical cast-in-place regions

Abstract

The seismic performance of precast reinforced concrete (RC) coupled shear walls is significantly influenced by coupling beams and the beam-to-wall joints during large deformations into plastic ranges. This study investigated the use of engineered cementitious composite (ECC) in the cast-in-place beam-to-wall joints and the upper regions of the composite coupling beams as an innovative method to improve the seismic performance of precast RC coupled shear walls. Two 1/2-scale precast coupled shear walls were tested under reversed cyclic loading and seismic behavior in terms of failure characteristic, mechanical characteristic value, load-displacement hysteresis curves, load-displacement envelope relationship, stiffness degradation, ductility and energy dissipation capacity were evaluated. Research results show that the substitution of concrete with ECC in the critical cast-in-place regions proved to be an effective method to improve the seismic performance of the two-story spatial of precast RC coupled shear walls.