Enhancing the resilience of reinforced concrete shear walls using replaceable buckling-restrained elements

Reinforced-Concrete Shear Wall (RCSW) is a common lateral resisting system especially in mid and high-rise structures. This popularity among engineers is due to high ductility and in-plane stiffness of the RCSWs. RCSWs have shown good performance as seismic load-bearing systems in past earthquakes. However, the main disadvantage of RCSWs is the crushing of concrete at the foot of the wall and as a result the buckling of the reinforcement in this area, which makes it difficult and, in some cases, impossible to repair after the earthquake. As a solution, using Buckling-Restrained Brace (BRB) as boundary elements at the base of the RCSWs is proposed and investigated in this research. For this purpose, two sets of 6 and 12-storey structures with conventional RCSW and BRB-RCSW as lateral resisting system were designed, and their seismic response were assessed through static (monotonic and cyclic), dynamic Nonlinear Time History (NLTH) and Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Analyses (NIDA). The results indicate improved structural performance and an increase of response modification factor from 4.4 in conventional RCSW to 5.47 in RCSW-BRB. Furthermore, the proposed system prevents the induced damage at the foot of the RCSW while the replaceable BRBs act as the fuses, increasing the resiliency of the structure. So that the behavior factor of the frame equipped with buckling-restrained braces increased by 30 percent in the 6-story building and 20 percent in the 12-story building.