Self-Centring Earthquake-Resilient Hybrid Steel-Concrete Shear Walls with Rocking Beams

Control of both structural and non-structural damage is of utmost importance in Performance-Based Earthquake Engineering.

Alleviation of the structural damage and reducing collapse risk under sever ground motions has been a general research focus in earthquake engineering.

However, earthquake reconnaissance reports also foreground the significance of injuries, fatalities and economical losses due to failure of non-structural components.

Furthermore, the functionality of some critical buildings carrying acceleration-sensitive equipment such as hospitals can be interrupted due to non-structural damage after a seismic event. Therefore, it is vital to urgently meet an inevitable social demand for truly resilient construction.

In target resilient buildings, both structural and non-structural damage should be minimized simultaneously in order to mitigate direct and indirect losses such as repair costs and costly downtime during which the building cannot be used or occupied. Different strategies have been implemented by researchers to mitigate the structural and non-structural damage.

As an instance, self-centering frames have been developed with the aim of avoiding residual drifts after a seismic event.

Meanwhile, hybrid steel-concrete frames consisting of coupled walls with controlled energy dissipation mechanism have recently grabbed a lot of attentions since they take the advantage of both stiffness of RC walls and the ductility and energy dissipation capacity of steel components.

The aim of this project is to develop and investigate a novel resilient structural system in which a self-centering mechanism is coupled with hybrid steel-concrete structural systems.

Hence, the new system will be capable of resisting moderate to high intensity ground motions while both structural and non-structural damages are kept minimum simultaneously.

Employment of this novel earthquake resilient structural system also leads to sustainable, fast and simple construction.