Cyclic behavior of squat reinforced concrete walls with openings typical of exterior walls of row houses in Taiwan

摘要

Five full-scale reinforced concrete wall specimens with openings typical of the first story backside exterior walls of row houses in Taiwan were tested using lateral cyclic loading to study their seismic behavior. The effects of location and size of the window opening were studied. Test results showed that the wall with the window opening on the side of the wall web showed a higher average lateral strength than that with the opening placed around the center of the wall web. The increase of the opening length reduced more the lateral strength than the increase of the opening height. A critical wall segment tended to show a lower lateral strength when the edge of the segment is bordered by a door than by a boundary column. To estimate the lateral strength of the wall specimens, a detailed and three simplified models are proposed. Comparison with the test results shows that ignoring variation in the axial force among the wall segments and columns does not change the average prediction but increases the scatter of prediction. Simply summing the lateral strengths of all the wall segments and columns together further increases the scatter and greatly reduces the degree of conservatism. Summing the lateral strengths of all the web segments requires the least computational effort but greatly increases the degree of conservatism.