Structural performance of reinforced concrete wall with boundary columns under shear load

This paper proposed a novel form of reinforced concrete (RC) shear wall confined with boundary columns. The structural effect of applying steel fiber reinforced concrete (SFRC) in the wall-column systems was studied. Three full-scale wall samples were constructed including two RC wall-RC column samples with different stirrup ratios and one RC wall-SFRC column sample. Low frequency cyclic testing was carried out to investigate the failure modes, hysteretic behavior, load-bearing capacity, ductility, stiffness degradation and energy dissipation. ABAQUS models were set up to simulate the structural behavior of tested samples, and good agreement was achieved between numerical simulation and experimental results. A further supplementary parametric study was conducted based on ABAQUS models. Both experimental and numerical results showed that increasing stirrup ratio in boundary columns did not affect much on load bearing capacity or stiffness degradation of the system. However, applying SFRC in boundary columns showed significant enhancement on load bearing capacity. Numerical simulation also shows that the structural performances of RC wall-SFRC column system were comparable to a wall-column system fully with SFRC.