Study on a seismic slit shear wall with cyclic experiment and macro-model analysis

The concept of the seismic slit shear wall was proposed in the early 1990's. A series of experimental and theoretic studies on the wall with reinforced concrete short connecting beams cast in the slit were carried out. In this paper another type of slit shear wall is studied. It is one with vertical slit purposely cast within the wall, and the rubber belt penetrated by a part of web shear reinforcement as seismic energy-dissipation device is filled in the slit. Firstly, an experiment under cyclic loading was carried out on two shear wall models, one slit and the other solid. The failure mechanism and energy-dissipation capacity are compared between the two different models, which testifies the seismic performance of the slit wall improved significantly. Secondly, for engineering practice purpose, a macroscopic analytical model is developed to predict the nonlinear behavior of the slit shear wall under cyclic loading. The mechanical properties of each constituent elements of this model are based on the actual behavior of the materials. Furthermore, the effects of both the axial force and bending moment on the shear behavior are taken into account with the aid of the modified compression-field theory. The numerical results are verified to be in close agreement with the experimental measurements.