Seismic Performances of High-Strength Concrete Shear Walls Reinforced with High-Strength Rebars

The investigation focused, in the paper, on developing a method of the improvement in the capacity and deformation of a concrete shear wall reinforced with high-strength rebars under the actions of the horizontal forces. For the cantilever shear walls, the ultra strength rebars were placed both in the two boundary columns using as transverse stirrups and longitudinal reinforcements, and in the central part of the wall using as horizontal and vertical distributed steel. To validate the proposed method, a nonlinear FEM model for the shear walls was set up and a numerical simulation was finished for the understanding of the parametric influences and failure mechanism. To examine the efficiency of the FEM model and the results of the numerical simulation, a pseudo static test, which included five high-strength concrete shear walls reinforced with the ultra strength rebar, was tested under cyclic lateral loads combined with constant vertically axial forces. The results of the experiments and numerical simulations both showed that the capacity and the ductility of the concrete shear wall were effectively increased by using the high-strength rebars.