A NUMERICAL STUDY ON LATERAL PERFORMANCE OF 3D SHOTCRETE WALL PANELS UNDER INCREMENTAL LATERAL LOAD

The use of 3D shotcreted panel is increasing in housing industry all over the world due to its unique advantages such as being light weight, fast construction, and easy to work with. 3D wall panels are the most common production of light weight precast shotcrete that are used as load bearing and nonstructural partition walls in structural building. There are many parameters aect structural behavior of 3D wall panels under dierent loading pattern that have not been considered yet though many researchers studied on this type of structural building system. In this research, structural behavior of light weight precast shotcreted wall is investigated using - nite element method. Dierent parameters like distance and diameter of steel mesh bar, the ratio of height to length (H/L), the thickness of shotcrete, the shape of shotcrete layer and the direction of connectors are taken into account. Nonlinear static analysis (pushover) is performed using nite element ABAQUS software. Of par- ticular interests are lateral resistance and deformation which are considered in order to evaluate and compare dierent congurations of the 3D wall panels. It is necessary to mention that the stress-strain curve and other characteristic of shotcrete were employed for modeling in ABAQUS. So, some experimental tests were conducted on the cores of shotcrete for determining of mechanical properties of shotcrete used in the models. Also, some tension tests are conducted on steel wires used in the panels in order to evaluate the stress-strain curve of the steel. The results indicate that shotcrete behaves completely dierent from the concrete. Also, the results obtained from pushover analysis show that increase of the diameter of steel mesh bar, the ratio of height to length (H/L), and decreasing of the distance longitudinal bars cause to lateral load bearing enhancement. But, increase of the diameter of transverse bars, thickness of shotcrete layers, and decrease of the distance of transverse bars have no signicant eects on the lateral bearing load.