Seismic Performance of a New Self-Centering Repairable RC Shear Wall

Permanent deformation after an earthquake increases the cost of the retrofit and even the implementation of the rehabilitation plan. A resisting system to control the lateral forces due to earthquakes is to use shear walls with good energy dissipation capability. Permanent deformation and cracking in the border and critical areas of the wall after relatively strong earthquakes leads to a decrease in the seismic performance of the wall. In this research, the responses and cyclic behavior of concrete shear walls under the cyclic loading protocol are investigated. For this purpose, using OPENSEES software platform, concrete shear wall modeling based on SFI-ΜVLEM method or wall modeling using multiple vertical elements based on the macro fiber method has been studied. The main models analyzed in this study include 2 concrete walls with steel rebars and memory alloy (SMA) with different dimensions and arrangement of reinforcements and innovative concrete wall with separate border elements in the form of concrete columns made of engineered concrete (ECC) and SMA rebars.  Validation of the models was based on previous studies. After validation of the initial models, the parametric study of the models was performed in order to investigate the effects of the dimensions of the boundary areas, the type and arrangement of the reinforcements and the amount of gravitational forces on the shear walls in the models. The results obtained from the outputs show that the use of SMA materials in the boundary areas of the wall has a significant effect on the self-centering behavior of the wall and the energy dissipation of the shear wall is reduced by using SMA materials.