Seismic performance of steel and concrete composite shear walls with embedded steel truss for use in high-rise buildings

Abstract

This paper studies the seismic behavior of steel and concrete composite shear walls with embedded steel truss, a crucial structural element for use in high-rise buildings. Three one-fourth scaled composite wall specimens with an aspect ratio of 1.0 were tested until to failure under reversed cyclic lateral load and constant axial load. The test parameters were the amounts of embedded truss chord and web brace. The behavior of the test specimens, including the damage formation, failure mode, hysteretic curve, stiffness and strength degradation, energy dissipation and ductility, were examined. Test results indicated that the embedded truss web braces affect significantly the hysteretic behavior of the composite walls in terms of lateral load capacity, energy dissipation and ductility, while the embedded truss chords can enhance the lateral load capacity. To further broaden the test results obtained, while searching for the optimal design, finite element (FE) models were validated against all the test results. Then 27 FE models that cover the practical ranges of axial load ratio, amount of embedded steel truss chord and web braces were adopted in a parametric analysis to investigate their effects on the wall performance. The results indicate that high axial load ratio is beneficial to initial stiffness and lateral load capacity, while adverse to energy dissipation capacity. Although increasing the volumetric ratio of embedded truss web brace can most effectively increase the lateral load capacity, a medium level about 1.59% is its optimum value for ensuring the critical seismic performance in terms of energy dissipation and ductility. In order to avoid the adverse effect on ductility behavior, the axial load ratio should be limited to the medium level, about 0.13 for the nominal value or about 0.30 for the design value.