Cyclic performance of steel moment frames with prefabricated RC and ECC wall panels

This paper presents an experimental and numerical study on the cyclic performance of steel moment frames with prefabricated wall panels. Two types of prefabricated wall panels are included in the test program, namely the reinforced concrete (RC) panel and the engineered cementitious composites (ECC) panel. Three full-scale frame specimens, with dimensions of up to 4,350 x 4,200 mm, are tested under cyclic loading to reveal the failure pattern, the hysteretic behaviour, the bearing capacity, and the stiffness degradation when working with different types of wall panels. The experimental results demonstrate that, compared to an RC wall panel, an ECC wall panel significantly improves the bearing capacity and the stiffness of a steel moment frame. Additionally, the steel frame-ECC wall panel specimen exhibits gradual reduction in bearing behaviour at the post-peak stage due to the ductile ECC material. A detailed finite element modeling (FEM) is established and validated by the test results. The laws of the internal force distribution are proposed for the steel frame-wall panel members, which indicate that the ECC wall panel works effectively at relatively larger drift ratios and exhibits superior synergistic characteristic with the steel moment frame.