Seismic performance of slender RC U-shaped walls with a single-layer of reinforcement

Reinforced concrete walls are commonly used to resist the lateral loading induced by wind and earthquake actions. While most walls include two vertical reinforcement layers, some regions of the world construct slender, non-rectangular concrete walls with a single vertical layer of reinforcement. The seismic performance of such elements is largely unknown given the paucity of experimental research. This paper presents the results of two slender reinforced concrete U-shaped walls tested at the Earthquake Engineering and Structural Dynamics Laboratory (EESD Lab), École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. Both wall specimens, designed similar to construction practice in Colombia, were tested using quasi-static cyclic loading to observe if out-of-plane instability would develop when deformations were limited to prevent the flange boundary ends crushing. Initial failure of both wall specimens corresponded with local out-of-plane buckling in the boundary ends of the flanges occurring on load reversal. The buckling lengths were approximately 700–800 mm, which corresponded to 44–50 bar diameters. The crack patterns were observed to be steepest in the web of the walls, demonstrating the increased shear demand in comparison to that of a rectangular wall. Both wall specimens reached ultimate drifts larger than 2.5–3.0% before global failure occurring in the web-flange intersection due to crushing. A small twist was subjected to one of the walls when centered and loaded diagonally, which showed that the decay in torsional stiffness is proportional to the decay in translational stiffness.