Shear strength of concrete filled glass fiber reinforced gypsum walls

Glass fiber reinforced gypsum (GFRG) walls, known as a green product that helps to save energy and protect the environment, are promising new building materials developed in Australia in the early 1990s. Driven by the wide-spread interest from the construction industry and the research community, substantial research has been carried out in Australia and a few Asian countries such as China, Malaysia and India to investigate its performance, including the structural behavior for building construction. This paper investigates the shear strength of GFRG walls fully or partially filled with concrete in the hollow cores. Eight full scale GFRG walls were tested under cyclic loadings. The shear performance of the tested walls, including the shear failure mode, hysteresis responses, the ultimate shear strength and the axial load effect, were studied in the paper. With the aid of nonlinear finite element analyses, a design procedure for the shear strength of the concrete filled GFRG walls is developed.