Seismic performance of steel plate reinforced concrete shear wall and its application in China Mainland

Reinforced concrete (RC) shear wall is one of the predominant structural components used extensively in high-rise buildings to resist lateral loads induced by earthquakes around the world. However, the past earthquake experience and previous research indicated that RC shear walls at the bottom of high-rise buildings may display the undesirable performance when subjected to severe earthquakes. For this reason, the steel plate reinforced concrete (SPRC) composite shear walls have been developed, and especially popularly used in super-tall buildings in China Mainland in recent years. At first, the application of SPRC shear walls in China Mainland is briefly introduced. Then the modelling techniques with the aid of software OpenSees to simulate the hysteretic behavior of SPRC shear walls are presented and validated by typical experimental results. The verified numerical model is further used in the parametric study focusing on a number of important parameters, including the steel plate ratio, the axial compressive load ratio, the concrete strength, and the web reinforcement ratio. The results of this parametric study provide useful information for the engineering application of SPRC shear walls.