Comparison of Cyclic Behavior of Precast Concrete Frame with and without Addition of Steel Shear Wall

One of the most important determinants of securing the structures in seismic zone is reinforcement of the structures for resisting against the lateral loads. In the recent years, for reinforcing lateral load-resisting systems, implementing applicable elements such as precast concrete and steel plate shear walls as a new approach has attracted many scholars in the area of construction industry. This scholarly attraction refers to the potential benefits of using these advanced operational techniques from the perspective of being affordable, expediting operations and flexibility. Reviewing the research background in the areas of precast concrete frame and steel shear walls reveals that in the past studies, the aforementioned elements have been studied separately and despite the attention of the researchers in the field of civil engineering, none of them have concentrated simultaneously on the systems of precast concrete frame and the steel shear wall together in their studies. Another aspect to consider is the fact that new and modern cities are in the dire need of industrialized construction. This is an important issue since need for quality habitat grows more and more because of high rate of population in the expanding cities. Use of precast segments is a solution in response to this significant demand. Therefore, the present research focuses on the system of precast concrete structures with steel shear walls. In particular, the purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of steel shear wall as a lateral load-resisting element on precast concrete frames using cyclic analysis. In order to achieve the research objectives and performing cyclic analysis, the OpenSEES software was utilized. There are several options in OpenSEES for nonlinear modeling of structural members. They include distributed and concentrated plasticity options. The distributed nonlinearity is closer to reality as experience shows that nonlinear action is actually distributed along a certain portion of members before total failure. On the other hand, use of distributed plasticity option encounters certain difficulties when calculating with reverse loading conditions. The concentrated plasticity option is preferred for the same reason as it has proved to yield results that are close enough to representative response values determined using the other option. That is why the concentrated plasticity computation framework was selected in this research. Moreover, and to the same extent of discussion, different nonlinear stress-strain models can be picked up in OpenSEES. The Steel02 and Concrete02 material constitutive relations benefit from both simplicity and accuracy. The same relations were chosen to cope with the needs of the current research work. For this purpose, the relative behavior of precast concrete frames with a steel shear wall in buildings with different numbers of floors (3, 5 and 10 floors) and different beam-column connections categorized based on their stiffness, strength and construction details as rigid and semi-rigid, were analyzed. Additionally, the behavior of precast concrete frames with steel shear walls (with semi-rigid connections) and concrete frames without steel shear walls (with rigid connection) in buildings having the stated number of floors were examined on the basis of the aforementioned parameters. In general, the results generated by the analysis confirmed the positive and appropriate effect of steel shear walls on the lateral behavior of the precast concrete frame. The results of the research clearly showed that the use of steel shear walls in precast concrete buildings could reinforce lateral load-resisting system and could increase the safety of the structure in the seismic zones. Therefore, this research contributes to the literature by recommending the use of steel shear walls in precast concrete buildings and suggests further studies on this system, including use of a wider range of buildings and earthquake ground motions on various soil types.