Earthquake effect on the concrete walls with shape memory alloy reinforcement

Literature regarding concrete walls reinforced by super elastic shape memory alloy (SMA) bars is rather limited. The seismic behavior of a system concurrently including a distinct steel reinforced concrete (RC) wall, as well as another wall reinforced by super elastic SMA at the first story, and steel rebar at upper stories, would be an interesting matter. In this paper, the seismic response of such a COMBINED system is compared to a conventional system with steel RC concrete walls (STEEL-Rein.) and also to a wall system with SMA rebar at the first story and steel rebar at other stories (SMA-Rein.). Nonlinear time history analysis at maximum considered earthquake (MCE) and design bases earthquake (DBE) levels is conducted and the main responses like maximum inter-story drift ratio and residual inter-story drift ratio are investigated. Furthermore, incremental dynamic analysis is used to accomplish probabilistic seismic studies by creating fragility curves. Results demonstrated that the SMA-Rein. system, subjected to DBE and MCE ground motions, has almost zero and 0.27% residual maximum inter-story drifts, while the values for the COMBINED system are 0.25% and 0.51%. Furthermore, fragility curves show that using SMA rebar at the base of all walls causes a larger probability of exceedance 3% inter-story drift limit state compared to the COMBINED system. Static push over analysis demonstrated that the strength of the COMBINED model is almost 0.35% larger than that of the two other models, and its general post-yielding stiffness is also approximately twice the corresponding stiffness of the two other models.