Experimental investigation on seismic behaviors of precast concrete shear walls with sleeve grouting defects

The grouted sleeve connector is one of the most widely used connections in precast concrete shear wall structures. Due to the technology limit of the assembly workers, the sleeve grouting often has defects, which could significantly weaken their practical performance. Only considering the effect of defects on the bearing capacity of the sleeve connector cannot simulate the effect of defects in actual engineering. To this end, an experiment was carried out to investigate the seismic performance of precast concrete shear walls with sleeve grouting defects. Four full-scale precast concrete shear walls with different defect levels of insufficient grouting were designed and tested under cyclic loads. The development of concrete cracking, failure mode, hysteresis features, load-bearing capacity, stiffness degradation, structural ductility and energy-dissipation capacity are analyzed to reveal the influence of the sleeve grouting defects on precast concrete shear walls. The test results indicated that with the increase of the defect level, the opening gap between the bottom of the wall and the top of the foundation beam widened, and the failure mode changed from tensile fracture of reinforcing steel bar to anchorage failure of the tensile reinforcement on the defective side. Meanwhile, as the level of grouting defects increased, the bearing capacity decreased, and the specimen failed prematurely. The effect of the grouting defects on cracking load was minor, while they had a significant influence on the yield bearing capacity, peak bearing capacity and ultimate bearing capacity. The experimental results also indicated that the grouting defects caused the weakening of the stiffness, ductility and energy dissipation of the precast concrete shear walls. The presented work could be used for defect prevention and evaluation of precast concrete shear walls with sleeve grouting defects.