Seismic performance of coupled shear walls with novel hybrid construction methods under high axial loading

Abstract

In this paper, two novel hybrid construction methods were proposed for coupled beam shear walls with both prefabricated and cast-in-place (CIP) components in order to control the construction quality, reduce environmental impact and accelerate the construction speed for high-rise buildings. The first one was designated as a composite wall, which consisted of an inner prefabricated frame wall and an outer post-cast frame wall. The second one was a post-cast beam coupled wall, which was made of double prefabricated wall legs and a CIP coupling beam. A full-scale experiment was then designed to test five specimens of identical geometrical dimensions and structural details under a constant high axial load ratio of 0.5 and cyclic loads to evaluate the seismic performance. They were one CIP, two identical composite walls, and two identical post-cast beam coupled walls. The results indicate that: (1) the proposed hybrid prefabricated shear walls had almost similar flexural failure modes and cracking distribution with the CIP wall; (2) both proposed walls had comparable seismic performance with the CIP wall in terms of lateral load capacity, deformability and ductility; (3) the proposed composite walls had significantly larger energy dissipation capacity than the CIP wall; (4) the identical walls of the same construction method had similar performance, indicating a stable performance of the proposed walls; (5) under the high axial loading, the ductility of the proposed walls had a good ductility in the range of 3.25–3.83. Overall, the proposed walls have a satisfactory seismic performance and hence can be taken as an alternative for the conventional CIP coupled shear walls in practice for high-rise buildings.