Experimental evaluation on the seismic behavior of precast concrete shear walls with slip-friction devices

An innovative precast concrete (PC) shear wall structure, with horizontal joints made by T connectors and vertical joints employing slip-friction devices (SFDs) welded on steel columns, was recently proposed to be employed in regions of medium-high seismic hazard and preliminarily analyzed through tests. As a further research step, this paper presents the results of quasi static cyclic tests carried out on two PC shear wall specimens simulating a construction modulus being characterized by different slip activation force of SFDs. Failure mode, hysteresis behavior, skeleton curve, energy dissipation capacity, stiffness and strength degradation were analyzed and compared with the results from another test on a control specimen of a cast-in-situ (CIS) equivalent shear wall. The experimental results demonstrate that the innovative PC shear wall specimens exhibited similar flexure-compression failure mode as the CIS shear wall specimen. However, the innovative PC shear walls showed potentially superior seismic behavior than the CIS shear wall in terms of bearing capacity, displacement capacity, ductility, energy dissipation and strength degradation. Increasing the activation force of SFDs had little influence on the lateral bearing capacity and energy dissipation capacity of the innovative PC shear walls, but the deformability and ductility increased slightly. Furthermore, simplified formulations were proposed to evaluate the lateral load-carrying capacity of PC wall specimens, and the calculation results agreed well with the experimental results.