Numerical Simulation of the Seismic Behavior of Reinforced Concrete Walls
Abstract
The reinforced concrete thin wall construction system (MDCR) is one of the most widely used in countries such as Bolivia, Peru, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Colombia. These buildings have been designed in accordance with the standards of these countries, which, in most cases, do not have adequate specific prescriptions for this type of construction, since their guidelines for reinforced concrete design are based on previous versions of ACI-318, defined for the traditional reinforced concrete wall system, which has walls with greater thicknesses that facilitate the detailing of the reinforcement, the confinement of the concrete and allow for the control of instability outside the plane. Research and seismic events in Chile in 2010 and New Zealand in 2011 suggest that the MDCR system may have limited performance in the event of a seismic event, therefore, a better characterization of its structural behavior is required. In order to evaluate the performance of these buildings, it is proposed the use of a commercial software, widely used in the calculation offices, for the modeling of MDCR and of the buildings of this constructive system, considering its non-linear behavior. The Shell layered formulation of the ETABS program will be used. The models of walls are adjusted by means of the experimental response of tests of representative walls of this structural system, taken from recognized bibliographical references. The model of the buildings will be adjusted by means of the identification of the real dynamic properties obtained from the instrumentation of a typical building, by means of an environmental vibration test. The results of the numerical simulation allowed to evaluate the behavior of these constructions and confirm that this type of software is a valid tool, relatively simple and of low computational consumption to obtain a more accurate answer of the performance of this constructive system.