Study on the global bidirectional seismic behavior of monolithic prefabricate concrete shear wall structure

Abstract

The seismic responses of precast concrete structure are studied under the earthquake excitations, by applying the shaking table test on the 12-storey, two-bay, 1/5 scale monolithic prefabricate concrete shear wall structure (MPCSWS), which is designed with the Chinese codes and assembled by the precast elements and cast-in-place boundary elements in the laboratory. The model MPCSWS is subjected to a series of dynamic tests with increasing intensities. The phenomena of the MPCSWS are observed from the shaking table test, including the dynamic characteristics, accelerations, displacements, global hysteresis responses, torsion responses and failure mechanism. Test results indicate that the MPCSWS shows the equivalent connections with no visible cracks under the frequent and basic ground motions, and then the weak connections appear cracks to consume the earthquake energy. Meanwhile, the bidirectional accelerations, displacements, energy dissipations and torsion responses increase with the increasing of seismic excitations, whereas, the effective stiffness decrease. Furthermore, the connections mainly affect the initial frequency and plastic behavior of global structure, especially, the distribution of seismic responses under the strong earthquakes. It is recommended that the cast-in-place boundary elements effectively constraint the precast elements in the elastic stage in MPCSWS. And the theoretical model of connections under the shear-compression loading should be further studied to conduct the finite element analysis of structure to understand the collapse mechanism.